Thursday, 16 December 2010

Embedding blended learning - the key processes

You’ve probably seen this before but I thought it worth raising as evidence for a carpe diem approach.

The undergraduate experience of blended e-learning: a

review of UK literature and practice

Rhona Sharpe, Greg Benfield, George Roberts, Richard

Francis The Higher Education Academy – October 2006

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/documents/ourwork/research/literature_reviews/blended_elearning_exec_summary_1.pdf

Key recommendations

Use the term blended learning. Although difficult to define, the term ‘blended

learning’ is finding acceptance among higher education staff. We suggest that

the advantages of the term include its poor definition - which allows staff to

negotiate their own meaning - the implication of the protection of face to face

teaching, and the implication of designing for active learning.

Work with and within your context. We found that institutions who we had

identified as successful implementers of blended e-learning had highly

contextualised and specific rationales for their adoption of technology.

Similarly, successful local implementations were often in response to a real

relevant issues occurring at the course level.

Use blended learning as a driver for transformative course redesign. The

importance of transformative course level designs was identified as one of

three characterisations of blended e-learning. Throughout the review, staff

repeatedly identified engaging in course redesign as critical to their success.

The valuable features of the course redesign were identified as: undertaking

an analysis of the current course, collecting and making use of student

feedback, undertaking the design as a team, designs which make explicit

their underlying principles, and developing the course iteratively over a

number of years.

Help students develop their conceptions of the learning process. It seems to

be important how students conceive of their engagement with the learning

processes and activities within a blended e-learning context. In order to

support students, it is vital that we are consistent and transparent in

communicating our expectations about, for instance, attendance patterns or

how to engage in purposeful dialogue in asynchronous discussions.

Disseminate and communicate results of evaluations. The need to coordinate,

promote and disseminate results from evaluations was identified as

a crucial aspect of monitoring institutional strategies and course redesigns.”

Posted via email from abstractrabbit (Jim Turner) posterous

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