My experience is on developing and conducting blended learning classes in Software Engineering. I did not have the opportunity to develop fully online classes, and my first participation in an online class is in ONL.

Let’s start with a short definition of what I mean by blended learning: it is a combination of face-to-face and online experiences to produce effective and flexible learning. Everything can be “blended”. Flipped classroom is a variation of blended learning, but with slightly more
restrictive in definition.

To develop my blended learning class, I focused mostly on the content, and not so much on the tools used for online interaction. This is because the purpose of the transformation from a classical style to a blended style was to make time during the face-to-face interaction for more discussions on carefully chosen case studies. As such, I focused more on coming up with good questions/examples/discussion topics and conducting the face-to-face interaction.

I found that the type of content that you need to teach to the students might make or break things. Specifically, my observation was that students tend not to read/watch the materials before class, and they come unprepared. This can be improved by having well-prepared materials (readings/videos), and by awarding some marks for completing a short quiz before the class. However, having a content-intensive class done in a blended learning style might not work because it is impossible to have enough activities that ensure that students studied the whole content. I find that blended learning works best for content-light classes and discussion-based groups.

During conducting the face-to-face, I observed that we need to be consistent in the way we conduct the class. I blended all sessions (not only some), and I had roughly the same flow for each of the sessions, such that the students can follow easily after the initial adapting time. Changing the way we interact (online or face-to-face) at every session might introduce some confusion about what the students are expected to do.

Another important point was that I needed to prepare everything in advance for the class, and stick to the schedule. Usually more manpower is involved in teaching a blended learning class, and they also need to have time to prepare and adapt. In conclusion, I believe that structuring the content for blended/online delivery, and the type of content used are some important factors that make some classes better for online learning.