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For blended learning workshop
- 1. Blended Learning Overview Lanny Arvan February 2011
- 2. Blended Learning – What is it?
- 3. What is it? Part 2
- 4. What is it? Part 3
- 5. Blended Learning – Why?
- 6. Why? Part2
- 7. Why? Part 3
- 8. Why? Part 4
- 9. Why? Part 5
- 10. Blended Learning – How?
- 11. How? Part 2 Which activities are done in each piece?
- 12. How Part 3?
- 13. How? Part 4
- 14. How? Part 5
- 15. How? Part 6
Editor's Notes
- This is a brief overview of blended learning to get the audience acclimated to the concept and to ready them for the presentations that follow.
- Blended learning is sometimes called hybrid learning and may go under other names as well. Most courses nowadays have some online component. Such courses, which are still mainly traditional in format, are called “Web Enhanced.” A blended course is typically more intensive in its online components and has less face to face time than a traditional offering.
- For some, the category blended learning only applies when the course is scheduled as such. Here we have a 3-credit undergraduate course which when taught traditionally was offered as two sessions per week in lecture and one session per week with a TA. Now it is offered in blended format with only one lecture session. The other has been replaced with enhanced online activities. If an instructor reduces the face to face contact hours on his own, I wouldn’t call that blended learning. It’s not prudent to comment on such an instructor action without understanding the particulars, but I can say as a general proposition that students should know the modality of the course offering before they enroll in it.
- Some people use the expression blended learning to refer to a different situation, where there are online learners and on ground learners taking the same class together. While this case is interesting to consider in its own right, for the rest of this brief presentation we’ll focus on blended learning meaning reduced seat time for students.
- The University of Central Florida was an early player in Blended Learning, where they called it “M Learning.” That university, located in Orlando, has experienced dramatic growth in enrollment. They service a commuter population. Their campus didn’t have enough classrooms. (Early on they taught classes in reclaimed movie theaters.) So much of the instruction was done online, both for student convenience and to economize on scarce classrooms. But they found that the online students wanted some face to face interaction with the instructor. So they introduced M Learning, which gave greater satisfaction for students than either totally online or totally face to face.
- Several peer campuses have gone to a blended approach in high enrollment undergraduate classes. Many students want the online aspect, large lecture classrooms have become increasingly scarce, and students typically play a very passive role in large lecture.
- Some courses are targeted for blending as an intermediate step to going totally online. If a course is taught in blended format in the fall and spring semesters, it is not that big a deal to offer a version of the course totally online in the summertime (or perhaps during the winter break as well). Indeed, going blended can enable multiple versions of the course offered in different modalities at the same time, staffing permitted.
- Many instructors find that in the regular classroom students are reluctant to participate. Going online may then be done to encourage the student to open up. Having done so online, students may then be more open face to face. So blending can be a student engagement strategy, particularly when the online pieces focus on student formative thinking.
- Undoubtedly, going to a blended approach entails substantial up front effort. And if instructors interact with students online that too can be time consuming, well after the initial development has been completed. But if a chunk of what is done online is “in the can” that piece can be re-used with little to no additional effort. For instructors who teach multiple sections of the same course or teach the same or similar courses repeatedly, blending can conserve on instructor time.
- Up till now we’ve been making the distinction between online and face to face. But it is actually helpful to break up the out of the classroom activities into those that are self-paced such as reading, view online lectures, working exercises, etc., and those activities that are collaborative, like conversing in an online discussion forum or using a wiki to do a class project. So it is helpful to consider a triangle of activities that overlap in some function but are otherwise distinct.
- One fundamental question is: which activities are done in each piece and does that partition make sense? Is each modality being best leveraged that way?
- Another fundamental question: do the various modalities of the class fit together into an interesting and coherent whole?
- Answering these questions requires substantial rethinking of the teaching. It is not simply a matter of taking an existing course and “converting” parts of it online. It requires a reconceptualization from scratch.
- However, for instructors new to blended or online learning that reconceptualization will not happen in one big gestalt. Instructors will go through an evolution in their thinking as they gain experience with blended and try things out and as they get more comfortable with the technology.
- This evolutionary approach features a positive feedback loop that can benefit traditional instruction the faculty member might do in the future. It is better to think of this feedback loop as ongoing than to consider the move to blended as one and done.