Many teachers experienced huge distress when they were suddenly forced to move to emergency online teaching in 2020 at the onset of the pandemic in Europe. Those who had little experience in using online resources felt lost, bewildered and left alone to sink or swim. How to do design your lessons, what tools to use, how to engage the class when most of the students’ cameras are off? How to know what is right or wrong in the world you don’t know?
After a year of working online many teachers learned using the trial and error method. Some created communities of exchange which helped them learn from others. I was lucky to have a great community of colleagues from UNICollaboration who offered their guidance and support before the pandemic, during the Virtual Exchange training period in 2018, 2019 and obviously in 2020. It was an invaluable experience. Each word and suggestion counted: ideas given by our mentors and facilitators as well as those given by regular VE-design course participants. These were all people who had experience or motivation to engage in Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), which by definition requires some expertise in the design of online learning, use of the media and pedagogy.
After a full year, when doing the Open Networked Learning (ONL) Course – section four devoted to the design for online and blended learning, I had a chance to reflect on my experience of online teaching in the academic year 2020/2021. It was fantastic to meet colleagues from Scandinavia and Singapore and see were we all were after 12 moths of struggling in the new environment. In our group we had teachers who came from varied educational backgrounds. Both Scandinavia and Singapore are famous for excellent level of teaching and I was curious to see how the teachers in those regions coped with the challenges of online teaching and learning.
In our ONL group there was an excellent mix of attitudes to the new way of teaching. Some of the teachers were great enthusiasts who saw the emergency online teaching as a great opportunity for the teachers to refresh their teaching practices. There were also teachers who claimed online teaching would never replace an authentic in-class interaction. Some of the teachers were ready to explore new online tools and approaches during our ONL course and those who wanted to resort to the techniques they used in the past and saw as reliable ones in regular in-class experience.
To be honest, it was hard to reach a unanimous decision how to present our group’s views on the design for online and blended learning. Two of our colleagues decided to summarize the points we made during our group meetings and they recorded their heated discussion using their university tools. But what I appreciated the most during those two weeks devoted to this topic was that we all agreed that it IS possible to design online and blended teaching in such a way as to achieve the right learning goals.
Definitions of online, hybrid and blended learning
We started by defining online, blended and hybrid teaching. It was funny to see that after a year of doing purely online teaching and after many years (for some of us) of doing blended teaching it was not easy to define what online, blended and hybrid teaching were. The notion of hybrid teaching was the vaguest one. It is interesting as the future seems to belong to various forms of hybrid or blended forms which many universities seem to be eager to implement in the next academic year no matter if the COVID-19 pandemic persists or not.
“Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.”—Jim Rohn
In our group we agreed that:
ONLINE teaching is a form distance teaching which is offered by means of online tools with the intention of allowing learners to acquire content knowledge, develop certain skills and experience connectivity, convenience and interaction despite being physically separated.
HYBRID teaching is a form of teaching simultaneously in-person and remotely by placing some students in class and allowing others to engage in the lesson from other locations by means of online tools. In hybrid teaching asynchronous methods of teaching can supplement both synchronous face-to-face in-class instruction and synchronous face-to-face online instruction.
BLENDED teaching is “the organic integration of thoughtfully selected and complementary face-to-face and online approaches” (Garrison & Vaughan, 2008, p. 148). The essential function of blended learning is to extend thinking and learning and discourse over time and space.
We also agreed that by offering a good mix of synchronous and asynchronous activities, using the right synchronous/asynchronous tools and applications, and by engaging our students in collaborative work sometimes we may achieve more than we were able to achieve when using the regular modes of teaching used in traditional classrooms. We had a discussion on the role of a teacher and the value of a flipped classroom and the community of enquiry.
