The concept of Blended Learning has made its entry into the education industry in recent years before the Covid-19 crisis. I don´t think it is anything new in terms of education, as most of what we’ve gone in the way of education has been more or less “blended”. No training is based solely on lectures, or only the reading of text material, or only films, or tests without prior information gathering. In elementary school, “flipped classroom” has been a buzzword for years. But most educations are, and always have been, a mix of different learning moments. These “moments” have happened in a classroom where they have now quite successfully moved to also to the online environment. Online learning has also existed already a long time but we did take a giant leap due to the Covid crisis.
I found Fiock´s (2020) article about building a community very helpful since I think that is very crucial. We discussed the importance of a community feeling for creating a meaningful learning experience in our ONL group. The seven principles of good practice combined with community of inquiry framework (Flock 2020) gave an excellent view of how the academic seem the instructional activities. Social presence online, such as icebreakers, has been seen as more challenging as on campus. It amasses me though how great activities we were able to do in breakout rooms when we were forced to go only online. Hodges et.al.(2020) talks about the importance of careful planning while creating online courses. Emergency online teaching feels already like a long time ago but I do remember students complaining of teachers just putting their power points and other materials online and expecting the students to mange the rest themselves. Already before Covid-19 we had long discussions in my institution about how time consuming it is to develop a full online course, there it is somewhat easier to have a blended one. This comes up also in Hodges et. al (2020) and in Flock (2020) articles.
I personally like Blended Learning because it gives me the opportunity to also meet my students face to face, make sure they have really understood the learning outcomes and it is easier to built a community. The students on the other hand love the option to have activities also online. As Vaughan et. al (2013) also argue the key with Blended Learning is to avoid layering of activities so that there is no time for students to reflect their learning.
Weller et. al. (2018) Iceberg model of learning design for student retention based on seven clusters could be very useful as well. This comes handy because, like we all know, the drop out percentage in online courses is high so if we would be able to somehow create a community and engage the students better we would definitely succeed! My ONL group reflected this dilemma also and the fact that sometimes there just is a bit lack of time. I have learned a lot from my group, had for example a wonderful presentation of the possibilities in gamification today. Also online role play would be interesting to try.
Fiock, H. (2020). Designing a Community of Inquiry in Online Courses. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(1), 135-153.
Hodges, C. et.al (2020). The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning. EDUCAUSE review.
Vaughan, N. D., Cleveland-Innes, M., & Garrison, D. R. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. Edmonton: AU Press. Chapter 1 “The Community of Inquiry Conceptual framework”. / Download the whole book.
Weller, M., van Ameijde, J. & Cross, S. (2018). Learning Design for Student Retention. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, 6(2)
