Distance Education in Transition - Master of Distance Education ...

A Pedagogical Model for Using Virtual Learning Spaces
that a new era is opening up with the computer-mediated, network-based multimedia
learning system in which educational considerations can be left far behind because they
allegedly point to the past, a pre-electronic era, and might get in the way of the
emergence of a new age of learning and teaching.
In contrast to this, the primacy of educational and even of pedagogical goals must be
stressed. Even the most powerful digital learning environment equipped with the most
up-to-date appliances remains an empty apparatus if all it is used for is to transport data
or information. Both have to be converted into "knowledge". Educational science can
provide teachers and students with inestimable services here, to name just one important
aspect.
Educational Perspectives
From a pedagogical point of view the virtual learning spaces sketched here are each
unusually attractive, because the specific activities which have become possible in them
can be developed individually and separately, as well as combined, bundled and
integrated. They provide new space for instructional design.
The profit to be gained here cannot be overestimated. Even if the digital learning
environment had opened up just one of the sketched new learning spaces, e. g. the
multimedia space, which enables different modes of presentation to be bundled, or just
the information space with its rapid access to the databases in the World Wide Web, this
in itself would have been a remarkable advance which would have aroused the enthusiasm
of the instructional designers and amazed the educationalists. Instead, we have at least
ten of these learning spaces each with its own specific learning activities which, taken
together, structure the virtual learning space for the digital learning environment in an
innovative manner. We are faced here with a modernising thrust of the first rank which
is without example in the history of learning, and whose effects still cannot be foreseen.
In daily use, because of the unique nature of these new learning opportunities and the
possibility of the easy to manage combination, the digital learning environment proves
to be an unprecedentedly versatile and extremely adaptable configuration of specific
hardware and software. Thanks to its flexibility and adaptability it can be used for many
educational services, not only to imitate traditional forms of instruction but also to
design innovative learning architectures. The purposes for which it is used depend on
many situational, institutional and economic factors, which of course also include the
learning-theory orientation and the willingness to innovate of teacher and students.
Technological Functions
The structuring of the virtual learning space through traditional forms of learning and
teaching are obvious and at first understandable as well, because we are moving here in
a new and previously unknown territory. However, they do not reflect the actual potential
of teaching and learning made possible by electronic systems, and in fact hardly touch
them. For this reason, I wish to propose a different structuring, one which is based
essentially on the opportunities provided by information and communication technologies.
It is important here to recognise their pedagogical possibilities.
Which are the technological functions that deserve special attention of instructional
designers? Speaking generally, what must be done here is to point to important working
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