Theory and practice in web-based delivery

A web-based delivery of higher education courses rapidly becomes ubiquitous, many thousands of individual case studies have been reported in the literature. However, comparatively few researchers have attempted to compare different models of web-based delivery, and fewer still have attempted to seriously relate educational theory to practice. This paper aims to fill a small part of that gap, and discusses current theory and practice in asynchronous web-based teaching and learning, using four models - the naive model, the standard model, the evolutionary model, and the radical model - first described by Roberts, Romm and Jones (2000).