It is the most interesting topic of this course, a good model for teaching and learning. Blended learning is a mix of online and face-to-face learning. A model that I am interested in is the “flipped classroom blended learning”. And Presumably the most widely known and used version of blended learning, where students get access to the course content at a digital platform before working through it at school. The teacher plays a dynamic role here that switches between the traditional roles and a facilitator depend on the course ambient and demand.

For this topic, we worked on “Canva“. It is a nice tool to be used, it gives some visual features and some nice templates. This graphic design platform is free to use but offers paid versions such as Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise.

For this topic, we focused on social presence, teacher presence, and cognitive presence. Social presence is an interpersonal relationship in an online community. It promotes comfortable and emotional connection, a sense of commitment, and closeness with other group members. Interestingly, social presence has a positive impact on learning outcomes, enhances course completion rate, and improves the correlation between teaching and learning. But how to promote social presence? Embedding social space in the course structure, designing smaller group size so participants can interact more. Designing collaborative tasks and keeping groups for a longer period will enhance social presence.

Teacher presence should be embedded during course design so teachers actively play role in qualitative feedback and summative and informative assessment. The teacher can steer the learners towards critical thinking by asking open-ended questions. Experience teachers recognize concepts and ideas worthy to be focused on, thus provide conceptual orders and organize activities towards those topics and interject when misconception is diagnosed.

Cognitive presence is defined as learners’ progress during the learning process; how they approach new challenges and problems, and how they address it to their learning community. Moreover, the ability of learners to recognize the problems, understand the tasks, and select strategies to find solutions. Teachers can push learners to the track and keep them to remain in the path of conceptual learning to achieve the cognitive presence

Blending these three elements in blended learning flourishes the creativity and maturity in the learners.