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Mark PegrumMark Pegrum
  • Overview of digital learning
    • Learning design
    • Digital literacies
    • Coding
    • PLNs
    • PLEs
    • E-portfolios
    • Digital safety & wellness
  • Tools for digital learning
    • Web 1.0 learning
      • Drills
      • E-books
      • Gamification
      • LMSs
      • Quizzes
      • Webquests
      • Websites
    • Web 2.0 learning
      • Blogs
      • Chat & messaging
      • Data visualisation
      • Digital storytelling
      • Discussion boards
      • Folksonomies
      • Gaming
      • LMSs
      • Microblogging
      • Podcasting
      • Polling
      • RSS
      • Search engines
      • Social networking
      • Social sharing
      • Videos
      • VoIP
      • Websites
      • Wikis
    • Web 3.0 learning
      • Semantic web
        • Generative AI
        • Search engines
      • Geospatial web
        • Augmented reality
        • Gaming
        • Virtual reality
        • Virtual worlds
    • Mobile learning
      • Apps
      • Augmented reality
      • Chat & messaging
      • Digital storytelling
      • E-books
      • Gaming
      • Geosocial networking
      • Multimedia recording
      • Polling
      • QR codes
      • Virtual reality
  • Keeping up with digital learning
    • E-language tag cloud
    • E-language conference blog
    • Conferences to attend
    • Journals to consult
    • Publications on digital learning
    • Publications on mobile learning
    • Blogs to follow
    • Feeds to follow
  • About Mark Pegrum
    • Biodata
    • Courses & seminars
    • Publications
    • Papers & presentations
    • Grants
    • Supervision
    • Interviews
    • Contact me

Webquests

Home Tools for digital learningWebquests
WebQuest.Org

WebQuest.Org (Source: Screen capture from WebQuest.Org)

Educational webquests involve students spending time on the web, seeking answers to one or more pre-set questions. Webquests were first conceived in the days of web 1.0 as a way of adding a guided discovery or problem-solving aspect to information retrieval tasks, and thus wrapping a more pedagogically contemporary approach around the informational web.

Webquests offer a way to make use of the vast array of reference materials contained in the web 1.0 layer of the internet. They can help to develop student autonomy (as students work independently) as well as digital literacies including information and critical literacy (as students learn to evaluate the information they find) and multimodal literacy (since students are often dealing with multimedia documents or artefacts involving some combination of text, images, audio and video). Such webquests can also be used to foster collaboration if students are asked to work in pairs or groups.

The simplest and least demanding webquests require students to collect a series of facts. At the other end of the continuum, sophisticated webquests may involve problem-based or inquiry-based learning, where students are set a real-world problem or question and must analyse, evaluate and synthesise the different information sources they locate. These latter webquests signal a move in a constructivist direction.

In recent years, thanks to the rise of web 2.0 learning, and the associated move towards students creating their own multimodal artefacts on the basis of their independent web research, there has been a shift away from the use of webquests. However, a promising constructivist task could involve students creating short webquests for their peers.

For further information and examples of webquests, and to create your own – or to have students create webquests for each other – you might like to check out WebQuest.Org (see image above).

Last update: April 2025.

Mark Pegrum

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Last updated 2025 · Content may be reused under CC BY 4.0 Licence except as indicated. Homepage image used under licence from Shutterstock (2017). Section title page images used under licence from iStock (2017).

 

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