The arrival of educational technology/instructional technology whether as a field of education or new terminology to what has been there before like teaching aids or apparatus, as it was earlier called (Abimbade, 2002). Nonetheless, by the middle of the 20^th century the growth in technology and applications even in the field of education became unavoidable to be ignored. The world of technology continued to grow and today the whole world has become a global village. By the beginning of the 21^st millennium educational technology has stretched educational boundaries and created new ones on a daily basis. One of these new and rapidly expanding boundaries is e-learning which is offering tremendous advantage to distance education. Distance education, some researchers and educators contend, is the new, student-centred paradigm for future learning (Miller, 1997; Yallen, 1998) with the growth in distance education from correspondence courses using the mails system which have been around for more than 150 years to modern technologies delivery systems such as video teleconferencing, affordable personal computers and the World Wide Web. Many Universities in Europe and America are offering courses and degrees on-line. For example, through University of Phoenix on-line, the University offers 25 programmes on-line in 16 different fields. They currently have 7000 instructors teaching over 49,000 students (Holcomb, King and Brown 2004).

In Nigeria, there is increasing awareness for the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in teaching and learning.

The country has a number of initiatives such as:

• National Policy on Computer Education;

• National Policy on Information Technology;

• Establishment of National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA).

Part of the National ICT initiative may be as  follows:

• To increase the amount of, and access to up- to- date ICT equipment to schools (i.e. developing the infrastructure through fund for ICT and buildings in schools and learning centres;

• To improve resources available, particularly online, to support classroom work (i.e. resources and school-based support); and to enhance staff skills and use of ICTs to deliver the curriculum  and in  staff development .

For us to understand the basic issues of e-learning we must come to terms with what learning is. In educational technology parlance learning is a permanent change in behaviour based on experience. That is, learning ensues from experience. However, the single most important factor which influences learning is “what the learner already knows’ this is the basis of the learning theory of Constructivism. The learner constructs his / understandings in such a way that makes sense to him. According to Jean Piaget who opined that knowledge cannot be transmitted intact from one person (be a teacher , student or instructor) to another, people must construct their own knowledge and their own understandings. Learning would not occur just by transmitting information from the teacher or the textbook (or the video, internet or the demonstration) to the learner’s brain. Each learner would construct his/her own meaning by combining previous knowledge (or prior information) with new knowledge (information) such that the new knowledge provides personal meaning to the learner . So, one can therefore describe constructivism as a learning process where the learner build his own knowledge and representation of knowledge from his own experience .Knowledge representation that e-learning provides would help learners to construct his knowledge from such representation .