Blended learning is mixed up in my mind into active learning. By active learning, I understand giving the students something ‘more’ than teacher talking alone for 1.5 hours. But blended learning (BL) is actually about blending face-to-face and online teaching. Then, what is face-to-face ? One could think that it is only physical meetings but it is actually also online meetings with faces showing to the participants. This is the bit confusing part.
Clearly, we have a connection to the concepts of synchronous and asynchronous learning within blended learning. This means that are we learning at the same time or not. Here, things get confusing if we start to assume that we may have face-to-face learning that is also asynchronous … ? Can we ?
The term COI (Community of Inquiry) pops up here and there when diving into BL. The meaning of it is many times made too complex by using ‘scientific language’. As Cleveland-Innes [1] nicely puts it, COI can be viewed simply as ‘a framework that describes the necessary elements to create deep and meaningful learning’. This consist of three main elements: Social presence, cognitive presence, and teacher presence. All three are needed to create a meaningful learning process.
Many times one important topic is forgotten when discussing BL. Here, I mean social justice. When we talk about BL, we mean online and face-to-face interaction, both. But how do you do online interaction or teaching if you have daily power outages ? Or how do you do BL if most of your students do not have computers ? Or how do you do BL if the internet connection is in practice not functioning at all ? These are the practical situations that many students and teachers alike are facing in their everyday work. So is BL only for the rich ?
[1] Martha Cleveland-Innes, Dan Wilton, Guide to Blended Learning, Commonwealth of Learning, 2018