“If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost”
Zig Ziglar
During the past blogs, I focused on explaining concepts that I learned during the duration of that topic. I tried to bring some answers and share what I thought were important concepts. However, today I bring something different. In this blog, I do not bring answers but questions. As a researcher, I am used to formulate research questions, but as an educator we feel that we should know all answers already. Nevertheless, in order to improve as educators, we also need to reflect and formulate our own pedagogical questions.
The current topic was course design. We, the PBL group, did not know too much about this subject. We talked about blended learning and the pros and cons of offline and online learning. We soon realized that what we thought was a clear separation was not so clear. Offline and online learning can not be treated as two separate things when we want to design blended courses. Both are intertwined. Activities need to be aligned to provide the maximum benefit of this approach.
Often when we think about blended learning, we imagine some asynchronous tasks that students can do online, such as watching videos, reading papers of taking quizzes. During the physical classes usually, we imagine that synchronous discussions take place. And there, I found what was my first question: Discussion is enough? Studies showed [1] that simply providing discussions to students in their learning is insufficient. Not all the students were able to recognize the value of discussions for their learning or approached discussions in a coherent way across the face-to-face and online contexts. In order for students to benefit from discussions, the results suggest that it is necessary to assist students in understanding the intent and benefits of discussions as a way to learn so that they can make the most of them. I personally think that the subject plays an important role in how to structure online and offline activities. We should try to find what is better for our students and the subject.
Putting that question aside. Have you realized? Not only online and offline terms were used in the previous paragraph. We realized that terminology is important. Online vs offline, Asynchronous vs Synchronous, physical vs virtual. All these aspects need to be considered and if you think about them, it is not so easy to separate them. Can you design activities that are asynchronous and physical? Online and synchronous? Physical and online? I think that we can find answers to those questions. In that case, can we really separate them? Or we should consider all parts of the same whole?
After trying and failing to classify and separate all these aspects of blended learning, we reach one conclusion. We should focus on the pillars and the things that have in common. At the end of the day, the pedagogical approach that we select for our course is what guides us and those approaches can be usually adapted to other dimensions.
As a group, we walked together through a difficult process these past weeks. Each time that we thought that were addressing the topic correctly we failed and feel confused with the results of our investigation. Someone could say that we haven’t learned anything then. But I know the truth. We learned even more than in other topics. We learned through the process, we collaborate, and discovered our ignorance, we learn from our mistakes. And today I can ensure you that despite to not have a solid knowledge about how to design blended learning, I have the mindset necessary to figure it out in the future. I learned what are the important things and the questions that I need to investigate. And finally but not less important, I discovered that we don’t have all the answers and that is okay. If we can formulate the right questions we will move forward and learn.
[1] Han, Feifei, and Robert A. Ellis. “Identifying consistent patterns of quality learning discussions in blended learning.” The Internet and Higher Education 40 (2019): 12-19.
