Enhancing Web Design Skills Through Online-Design-based Learning

Web design skills are an important component of media literacy, which usually receives little attention especially in higher education. Design-based learning (DBL) is one promising approach to support the acquisition of web design skills. Through this study, the Learning by Design (LBD) approach was followed to investigate if DBL can successfully be transferred to online learning and if online DBL needs to be scaffolded. This study focuses basically on examining the effectiveness of a computer-supported collaboration script and incomplete concept maps to foster both collaborative and individual learning outcomes related to design and building web sites of university students through online DBL environment.