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Abstract Increasingly, health and social work educators are joining their colleagues throughout higher education in exploring the possibilities of teaching and learning online. Online teaching and learning initiatives have been aided by both proprietary and open source course management systems such as BlackBoard and Moodle. However, the rush to put courses online is rarely informed by adequate consideration of the affordances of the World Wide Web to support different types of pedagogical dimensions or instructional design. In addition, academic staff members may jump into teaching online without sufficient consideration of the design components that can be implemented in online courses. This study provides an introduction to 10 design dimensions, derived from research and theory in instructional technology, cognitive science and adult education, for guiding the design and evaluation of online learning environments for health and social work education. It concludes by addressing the rewards and risks of online learning.
Reeves et al. (Fri,) studied this question.