A Blended Instructional Design Approach to Accessible Cyberlearning

Abstract

Technology-enhanced environments to support learning are becoming ubiquitous in both formal and informal educational contexts. Often, the use of technology presents many opportunities as well as challenges for evaluating what and how students learn. Further, the use of technology changes the interactions among the different agents and resources in the context; new routines, processes and curricula are often introduced to integrate technology in innovative ways. This warrants examining learning and interactions in the environment by using a variety of approaches. This section on evaluation, therefore, consists of a representation of methods that span a range of dimensions: qualitative and quantitative methodologies, understanding the context of learning and understanding individual learning gains, examining the processes of learning and the outcomes, to name a few. The data used range from the detailed log data and traces to an understanding of a product or artifact. The twelve chapters in this section bring these diverse perspectives together, to provide researchers with an array of methodologies for use in technology-supported environments. The twelve chapters fall into four main categories: understanding learning in all its complexity, artifacts and interactions, tools and methods, and cognitive and affective dimensions of learning.