This last week was Week 1 of EDUCAUSE's BlendKit: Becoming a Blended Learning Designer MOOC. Its stated goal "is to provide facilitated assistance to faculty members and instructional designers in developing and designing blended courses through (1) a consideration of key issues related to blended learning and (2) practical step-by-step guidance in producing materials for a blended course (e.g., developing design documents, creating content pages, and receiving peer review feedback at one's own institution)." The option I am pursuing is the UCF/EDUCAUSE Certified Blended Learning Designer credential. This blog post is a reflection based on what I learned this week, woven in with a recap of my own notes to better learn the concepts.
We just read a great chapter from the BlendKit Reader on Understanding Blended Learning. Blended Learning can address a variety of needs. It can help schools struggling with limited space, as well as facilitate faculty collaboration; it can provide new engagement opportunities for courses or provide transition between face-to-face and online learning; it allows for adaptive and differentiated learning; and for students it can combine convenience with real life social interactions.
If I didn't know better, personally I'd think that online, or partially online (blended) learning would be less effective than traditional face-to-face instruction. Fascinatingly, this seems not to be the case. A meta-analysis conducted by the U.S. Department of Education discovered that, "Students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction."
Additionally, "Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to pure face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction." Student analytics provide a rich source of information about learners, where they struggle, where they do better or worse and so on. Online tools also can enhance engagement.
However, blended learning also has proven to frequently be complex, time-consuming and fairly difficult to implement (Anderson and Elloumi, 2004). McGee and Reis (2012) lay blame with the design process, specifically course objectives. This seems intuitive to me from an instructional design perspective: a cardinal rule of educational technology is to not use technology simply for technology's sake, but to let a good instructional design process (needs analysis and the rest) to inform the use of technology. It would seem that if this process is not carefully followed, then the why, when, where, and how of applying technology by creating or converting instruction to be blended can result in a mess. Ingredients of traditional and online learning include live events, self-paced learning, collaboration, assessment and support materials. When an ideal learning experience is established, these elements can be analyzed to determined which pieces may be delivered online without compromising facilitating learning. Much simply comes from experience. Start small and evolve the blended learning design process gradually (Singh and Reed, 2001).
Two case studies in this chapter were helpful. Probably my biggest takeaway here was the reminder of the importance of what often obstructs implementation of blended learning, ironically a couple of the most basics learning design principles: follow a good instructional design process and don't use technology just for the sake of technology, but let it address the needs discovered and objectives formulated.
#blendkit2015
Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. (2004). Theory and practice of online learning. Athabasca: Athabasca University.
McGee, P. & Reis, A. (2012). Blended course design: A synthesis of best practices. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 16(4). Retrieved from http://sloanconsortium.org/jaln/v16n4/blended-course-design-synthesis-best-practices
Singh, H. & Reed, C. (2001). A white paper: achieving success with blended learning. Centra Software. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.114.821&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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