ABSTRACT
The field of instructional design can be traced back to its beginnings at the start of the 20th century, and hence has a much longer history compared to learning design, which only emerged around the beginning of this millennium. This chapter provides a brief historical overview of developments in both fields and how these have been influenced by the learning sciences, and the role technology has played in these two fields. It summarizes the key similarities and differences between these two fields, and put forward possible scenarios of how these two fields may co-evolve in collaboration with the burgeoning field of Learning Analytics to launch the development of a design science for learning. This strand of development in learning design reflects primarily efforts and concerns of the instructional design technology (IDT) community to address the design challenges of representing and implementing innovative pedagogical designs in online learning environments to meet the needs of education in the 21st century.
