This topic was really interesting to me because at my university due to the pandemic we are trying to shift more toward blended learning rather than total online teaching, because it suits us the best due to several reasons. The most important one is logistics; the infrastructure does not entirely help online teaching as we have lots of problems with electricity and internet connection at our country that affects the process of online teaching and there is no solution in near future for this issue. Also, having lots of professors that are relatively old enough to hate dealing with new technology and can’t cope with it. So, with this taken into consideration we thought that the best way to keep the process of learning going is to move toward blended learning; where students will have synchronous activities on face to face class and asynchronous ones on LMS and that the beauty of blending. Of course, to make blended learning work there should be lots of planning of new material at each course to suit synchronous and asynchronous activities, the tools should be available and friendly to use for instructors and students and there should be IT team to help and assist anyone with any technical problem they face.
There is lots of benefits of blended learning that improve the learning prosses and overcome some of the problems with traditional learning methods. The first advantage is flexibility in which the teacher can explain some of the difficult parts of the topic in a face to face class and leaves the other easier parts online for student to read and absorb without any barrier on time and location (2018_Cleveland-Innes-Wilton). The second benefit is enhancing the interaction and collaboration among students and between teachers and students while using different online tools like forums or E-white board etc. (2018_Cleveland-Innes-Wilton). The third one is enhancing the learning experience by preparing more new activities that can be made online to make sure no one of the students even the shy ones are left behind and everyone is participating. Also, preparing special activities or discussions at face to face class in a way that the teacher should connect all these activities in cycle to get the best of the students. And that what we focus on our PBL discussion on the wakelet .
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