Topic 4: Design for online and blended learning


Why blend? How to make a good blend?

Constructive alignment and focus on what the student does (Biggs & Tang, 2007) is a goal for me, and has been for a long time. It is easy, when you feel unsecure, to focus on what you yourself are doing. And that is not unimportant. But the mail focus shoul be on creating oppotunities for the students to work with their knowledge and to practice what is the learning goal. To keep the verbs in mind, for example "to reflect on", you can create opporutinies for the students to continously reflect. That is, for all kinds of learning design.

When it comes to blended learning, I like the definition of blended that emphasize the thoughtful process of design. It is not about how much is online versus on campus, but more about the process (Garrison & Vaughan, 2008). Some define it for example by percentages of online or campus, but how do you define how much is done online? You can for example use online resources in the classroom. And you can have rectures on a distace. And I don´t really think it is important either. The student learning is the important part.

I don't think there is a percentage that should be better than others, I think is depends on how you are blending, what kind of pedagogy you are using, and how you are using the online tools. I think the course design is important, and a lot of aspects are included in the process: Time at hand, target group, subject to learn, you pedagogical base. From that you can decide some things, for example the degree of collaboration. And then, from there, you can analyze what kind of tools you want to use; online or others...


Asensio-Perez et al. (2017) also suggests that we have to work with the pedagical design process, and educate teachers in this, to get good blended education. Murthy, Iyer & Warriem (2015) lifts the importance of teachers experiencing good blended learning first hand, to then develop their own practice further.

When starting to design a course it is good to have some kind of model or help. The five-stage-model is one (Salmon, 2013), where you first check access aspects, then social aspects, information exchange, then knowledge building and development. It is often obvious, for example, that you have to build a social learning environment before you can build knowledge together. But here she makes is very clear. The ABC learning design (Young & Petrovic, 2017) is another tool wich devides the design in learning types. A tool for analyzing your teaching, and how much feedback and collaboration there is, is the conversational framework by Laurillard (2009).


Reference

Asensio-Perez, J. I., Dimitriadis, Y., Pozzi, F., Hernandez-Leo, D., Prieto, L. P., Persico, D. & Villagra-Sobrino, S. L. (2017). Towards teaching as design: Exploring the interplay between full-lifecycle learning design tooling and Teacher Professional Development. In Computers & Education, 114(2017) 92-116.


Biggs, J. B., & Tang, C. S.-k. (2007). Teaching for quality learning at university: what the student does. Columbus: McGraw-Hill.

Garrison, D. R., & Vaughan, N. (2008). Blended learning in higher education. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.


Laurillard, D. (2009). The pedagogical challenges to collaborative technologies. In Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 4, 5-20.

Murthy, S., Iyer, S. & Warriem, J.. (2015). ET4ET: A Large-Scale Faculty Professional Development
Program on Effective Integration of Educational Technology. In Educational Technology & Society,
18(3) 16-28.

Salmon, G. (2013). Five Stage Model. [https://www.gillysalmon.com/five-stage-model.html] 2017-12-10.

Young, C. & Petrovic, N. (2017). ABC Learning design. University Collage London. [http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/abc-ld/] 2017-12-10.

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