While online teaching may be the wave of the future, it is not for this author, who writes "I trained for it, I tried it, and I'll never do it again." An instructor with years of experience successfully teaching in collegiate classrooms, she says online teaching does not compare. So she will chalk up her first and only venture to experience and…

This field experiment begins to build a theoretical framework for exploring the effects of media characteristics on subjects' understanding and integration of information. Students in two eighth-grade science classes wrote term papers with one class using a print encyclopedia and the other an electronic encyclopedia to conduct their research. A…

This field study examined learning effects attributable to instructional design characteristics when eighth-grade science students used a print encyclopedia or a videotex version of the encyclopedia to write term papers. Results suggest that specific effects of instructional design characteristics of a delivery system are of a limited nature. (MBR)

This collection of five articles presents the viewpoints of experts on various aspects of the field of instructional technology (IT). Wesley C. Meierhenry traces the history of IT from its original emphasis on audiovisual media to its current concern with instructional design and the use of systems and systematic approaches. Henry T. Ingle…

Online teaching technologies still have three main disadvantages: cost, complexity, and negative impacts on productivity. In many areas of Canada, cost is still a major factor affecting ownership and use of computers and other new technologies. Until online teaching technologies become as simple to use as telephones and new cars, they will…