Michael E. Griffiths

Rethinking Design and Learning Processes in Distance Education

In this chapter, we discuss an innovative view of designed instructional artifacts that we feel provides a key to the next-generation concept of distance education—and perhaps for the next-generation concept of designed instructional artifacts of any type. We begin with the assumption that what designers think they are designing guides their choice of the design architecture and of the building blocks they use in their designs. As designers come to think in terms of the new categories of designed artifact, new design abstractions and structures suggest themselves, and innovation in design is a natural result. The broader vision of what is designed at a deep level leads to revising traditional surface categories, which in turn leads designers to ask and answer new design questions.