2000 – Educational Technology and the Learner-centered model
The last ten years has seen a rise in the use of and the design and implementation of educational software and hardware for use by instructional designers to deploy coursework to learners. Asynchronous online course rooms and synchronous course modules for existing coursework have captured the educational world through several realities. First the need for educators to understand what the next generation of learners will be requiring and one of the themes that presents itself often is the idea of customizing education (Marx, 2006). Customizing education is attend that will seek to rewrite educational practice by allowing learners to fully customize their education to meet their individual goals. This has created the need of and response to the learner-centered model of education. For the first time, education is seeing a real sift from the teacher centered focus that has dominated education for many decades, to a learner-centered focus where each learner is responsible for his own learning and strategies of completion. Learners have become course evaluators and are often looked to for guidance in making the course more meaningful and significant to the future of the learners who are involved in online learning. Instructional design has answered the call by embracing the e-learning environment and even establishing online universities who specialize in training learners to design coursework for online environments. The instructional design community continues to be on the cutting edge of these new constructs and environments.

For the corporate world, the e-learning environment could be a key to the survival of training in the corporate setting. Many experts and corporations who would spend millions of dollars to host conventions and seminars are now turning to webinars and e-learning environments. Instructional designers are being hired by top companies and e-earning consulting is quickly becoming a road for many seasoned instructional designers to move towards as the demand for these types of environments becomes stronger. Many industries and consulting firms are investing in and conducting needs assessments and proposals for how it can leverage e-learning to impact the training needs of the firms’ employees and experts, but also the professional communities that are represented in the firm. These measures have been designed to help shift the paradigm of learning by going to seminars and conventions to the power e-learning and experiential learning environments that allow a corporation to customize their learning environments and training module to suite their specific needs and goals for the future (Erstad, 2003).