Thoughts on the BlendKit 2016 readings Week Four

Thoughts on the BlendKit 2016 readings

Content + Assignments = Modules as a “boxed lunch” of learning experience.

When we are talking about organizing content in a course that is designed to be partially taught online, and partially taught in the classroom, the question becomes how to build the experience so that the best parts of both mediums work in conjunction to create a complete, coherent, and naturally flowing experience.

This is one of the topics that are explored in the readings this week, and one that I personally am very interested in. The trick is to integrate the learning in such a fashion that each experience, be it online or in the classroom supports each desired outcome clearly. Content, understanding, and measurement of understanding must make sense to the student and also be clearly documented. Some of that is accomplished by attaching clearly articulated expectations, objectives, and narrative to the learning experience, but in in a hybrid format the mode and construction for each portion of the experience is equally important.

Some questions to ask would be how (in what mode) the content best is presented? How much of the content is technology dependent? Based on the objectives, what methods and technologies will best achieve learning from exposure to basic understanding, to mastery? What is the composition of the course in terms of online component vs. classroom? Also, what mode does the instructor work best in, flipped, partially direct instruction, or some combination of constructivist, constructionist, or other presentation mode?

Another aspect of this is how the students learn best. Does the course lend itself to the use of technologies and software design learning experiences, or is the approach more social, and if so how social? Is there a place for social media, or does the social aspect best reside in the course shell as chat and discussion board? That, in my experience, is dependent upon the comfort level of the instructor, the topic being covered, and the environment that students find themselves most comfortable in. In the many MOOCs that I have participated in for instance, there are clear preferences within the population for different communication methods. A group within a course may prefer Facebook or Twitter, while another group within the course may prefer asynchronous discussion boards. Do we differentiate for both groups, or does the instructor pick a single method?

The reading also covers learning activity types and technologies associated with them. These are broken down into Assimilative, Adaptive, Communicative, Productive, and Experiential. These would seem to be fairly inflexible categories, but they are not. One could have a productive assignment (such as journaling), with an assimilative  aspect if the journaling were was to be done by an appointed student exemplar who was tasked with reacting to next week’s readings prior to them being released to the rest of the class. Further, that journal could become the basis for individual reactions could be discussed in the classroom or as comments to the journal online. What I am trying to point out here is that there is any number of possibilities when constructing assignments and these can address multiple types and also integrated across online and classroom.

Ultimately, the tools that we use to construct meaningful lessons and assignments across online and classroom experiences that bridge the gap between the two modes is limited only by our imagination.