Whether with trepidation or triumphant, we, as educators, venture into the next millennium guided by a paradigm shift of changing student needs. Traditional methodologies and traditional classroom settings are transforming, expanding beyond the four-walled cubes into the “virtual” amorphous cyberspace classrooms and reality sites outside of the typical ivy-covered towers of higher education. Because of technology-driven telecommunications and growing student diversity, we have a responsibility to be more innovative in our pedagogical approaches. Designing creative virtual classrooms developed within a theoretical framework of rationale is one answer.

Teaching is just not a means of transferring information from the textbooks to the notebooks of the student. Famous scholar and a humourist, Mark Twain once remarked, “Education is an art of passing on the information from the teacher’s notebook to the notebooks of the student, without going through the heads of either of them”. This may seem to be an exaggeration. But the fact remains that in most cases, teaching has been reduced to either sermonizing or dictating notes.