Looking to the developments in teaching one has to admit that learning-outcome based teaching is on today’s educational agenda. This applies for technology based teaching too. One European trend, which can be observed in e-learning, is the so-called didactic design (Gissel, 2011, p. 17; Ballstaedt, 1997; Kerres, 2006). Didactic design is to be described as the development of an environment that supports learning from its conceptualizing phase until its evaluation. These definitions have a strong affinity to the planning oriented instructional design approaches. One explanation is that ICT based learning needs explicit advanced planning for the application of media. Educators seek to prescribe the opportunities for interaction between the learner and the media, which have to be determined a priori (see Kerres, 2006). Reinmann extended this definition to a rather general use. She writes that Didactic Design is a prescriptive approach that aims at the design and construction of environments to offer learning (2013, p. 5f). The concept of didactic design is been used in a variety of meanings in Scandinavia too, for instance of Selander (2009) or Meyer (2011). A short overview will be given to show the distinctions and the interrelations to the instructional design paradigm (Hillen & Landis, 2014). However, it seems that the measurement of learning outcome and the objective of competence-based teaching have been a strong baseline or a shaping factor for instructional design approaches (Tennyson, 2010). This contribution will revisit and analyze approaches of Instructional Design and of Didactic Design. It will take up the exiting discussion of changes of educational paradigms and its potential influence on e-learning design in Europe.

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