Knowledge and media engineering for distance education

Designing media for learning is a difficult process and any deficiencies in the authoring process are likely to be reflected in the student’s educational experiences. Course sequencing has became an important research issue for educational hypermedia, which among others resulted in standardization issues of learning metadata. However, the complexity of the design process has often been overlooked. A big problem is the necessity to start from a textbased tradition of teaching and learning, which is used to design knowledge in a fixed way and in a hierarchical and linear structure of knowledge management. Educational media will only efficiently support the learning process, if the conceptual design models of the members of the design team fit together and if these conceptual models take into consideration the tasks and needs of different learners in the information society. Vital aspects of the conceptual models of the designers on course design are concerned with userand task analysis, which in the context of webbased courses is at least to some extent a didactic conception of the media.