ActiveHealth: enhancing the community of physical and health educators through online technologies

This chapter explores the perspectives of an instructional design team that designed and developed an online environment to facilitate the Australian physical and health educators' community of practice. The objective of the multidisciplinary design team was to determine what activities and supporting technologies would help invigorate senior members and initiate novice members to this well-established community. The chapter describes the community and the particular challenges it faces; details the design, development and implementation processes for the online environment and activities; identifies the issues addressed during the design and implementation process; and, analyses the experiences of the initial implementation. The authors hope that the instructional design principles derived from examining the challenges and successes for this particular community of practice will support designers and researchers working with other communities to address similar issues.