Reflections from readings in Blenkit 2016

I have been following Blendkit for three years now, and have basically taken what I need and not completed. That has been primarily because I have been working solely in online course development. Now I am actively involved in reinventing a program from a purely classroom mode to one where the course takes place 50% online. This requires a different take on my current skill set. So Blendkit 2016 become much more directly relevant to my continued education. Over the next few weeks I will posting reflections here as part of the assignments for this MOOC, based upon the readings.

The reading for the first week is on the nature of blended learning and the differences between it and a standard face to face course. While I appreciate the theory and the approaches to hybridizing courses, I find that what works for me is a little different. I'm not  a systems guy as much as I am about individualizing the experience of creation for the instructor, differentiated design for the strengths and weaknesses of the faculty member.

Much like anything else related to education, there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to developing a blended/hybrid learning course. Based on the reading and my experience with faculty, the amount of blend and what is contained within it has a lot to do with instructor teaching style, what they find valuable in terms of the interaction that they want directly with students, and also their comfort level with moving content online in the first place.

The type of course components that are best suited for a blended approach are also dependent on the instructor, which is why I think that a systems approach, while valuable if you can get buy in from your faculty on a standard delivery method and look and feel, many times will not work. Some faculty will see more value in a standard lecture approach, with the study materials and some student to student interaction in the online component, while others will wish to flip their course so that the majority of their time will be spent reinforcing the content.

In our case, since we do not wish to deal with accreditation issues in our courses, blended means less than 50% online. At the other end of the spectrum one graduate course that I attended was entirely online with the exception of being bookended with face to face courses that acted as an introduction to the course at the beginning, and a wrap-up and in-person presentation of class projects at the end. Again, it appears to me that the decisions is based upon what works best for the subject matter, the curriculum, the faculty, and student needs.

Design is an important aspect that ties back to everything I have mentioned above. Leveraging what faculty do best in the classroom is important, as is meeting student needs realistically. There are potentially a huge number of factors that play into design.  I suppose in the end I am more of a broad conceptualization type of designer.

 There are so many potentially valid approaches to mixing online and face to face content and delivery that using a single prescribed approach won't work in most cases. As I have redesigned courses that are fully online using my own experience and best practices, practices that I have arrived at over the last twenty years, I  am frequently reminded that my approach, and for that matter any given standard approach to ID, does not fit all cases. It pays to know what your tools (theories, technologies, and social interaction) do best, but it also pays to be flexible enough to help faculty leverage what they do best.

Thank you Linda for reviewing this!