What do we mean by blended learning? Working with this from a course design perspective, I find that, especially after the Covid restriction period, it is increasingly difficult to define the term, as I cannot find any educational circumstance that is not in some sense blended. Will the term be obsolete in the future?

In the ABC learning design workshop (Young & Perovic, 2015) the planned learning activities are categorized on the back of the cards in ”conventional method” or ”digital method”. Before the activities are planned, the participants are supposed to also envision how much of ”face-to-face” or ”online” the students are going to do their learning. This is my fourth year working with the ABC workshop with groups of teachers, and these categorizations are creating more and more confusion, as most of the activities can be for example face-to-face and digital at the same time. The students may come to campus for a lecture, but in the lecture, a lot of digital technology is used for student involvement and democratic dialogue in the classroom.

Cleveland Innes and Wilton (2018) define blended learning as ”the use of traditional classroom teaching methods together with the use of online learning for the same students studying the same content in the same course” and clarify this as ”the practice of providing instruction and learning experiences through some combination of both face-to-face and technology-mediated learning” (p. 12). I wonder whether this definition will become unnecessary, as all courses are blended in a way or another, from my point of view. There are online courses with no campus meetings, but often in the online courses, there are meetings that may be referred to as ”face-to-face”, with Zoom meetings and other digital meeting tools. Anyhow, the clear cut online course is easier to define than a clear cut campus course. There are campus courses, but I do not think there are any courses that do not have digital activities. Even if all of the lectures and meetings are set on campus, the students are most likely using digital technology for information retrieval, the learning platform is digital, a lot of asynchronous collaboration is probably performed using digital technologies and so on. Imagine a campus course with no digital technologies. Are there teachers who solely use the whiteboard (or blackboard?) for lectures and never post anything in the LMS, and the students are handing in handwritten assignments? I have never come across any teaching like that on this side of the year 2000. I am aware of the fact that I am currently living and working in a highly digitalized society, and that there are places in the world that do not have the same opportunities due to lack of functioning devices and internet connection.

So, do I see ”opportunities for further development in this area” as the Topic 4 assignment in the ONL course asks? I do see a need for educational development in general, and I need to use all available tools to achieve this development, but I do not see a future for the term blended learning, as we are all living and working in the digital world along with all of the IRL activities that we are performing.

Cleveland-Innes, M. & Wilton, D. (2018). Guide to Blended Learning. Burnaby: Commonwealth of Learning. http://oasis.col.org/bitstream/handle/11599/3095/2018_Cleveland-Innes-Wilton_Guide-to-Blended-Learning.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Young, C & Perović, N (2015) ABC Learning Design. About ABC Learning Design. https://abc-ld.org/