Online teaching is changing how education is delivered. As part of this change, institutions of
higher education in the USA are not only reexamining their policies and regulations that were
originally written for traditional classroom delivery, but are also adopting technology as an
essential tool to increase their global outreach and advance their competitiveness. The ubiquity
of technology and unprecedented access to online resources combined with emerging learning
and instructional theories have created a new venue for future teaching and learning. A review
of 29 studies on online research conducted between 1995 and 2006 by Bekele and Menchaca
(2008) found that the trend for most effective online learning has been gradually toward
problem-based and group-based learning as it was “a way of sustaining student motivation and
increasing achievement by creating opportunities for collaborative problem solving” (p. 389).
This emerging trend demonstrates that online learning is not only adopting the technological
prowess to create feature-rich learning management systems but also gradually incorporating
effective pedagogical and instructional strategies for learners to engage in meaningful
knowledge construction.