BlendKit2011 Week 1: What will my blend be?

A main part of my work concerns online learning, and this week I have been working on a course on course redesign, for instructors who want to (re)design a course for blended, hybrid or online delivery. (A quick review of definitions is in order. I use these terms thus: Blended means adding online learning tasks or interaction to a face-to-face course; hybrid means decreasing the face-to-face time and increasing the required online learning and interaction, usually to about 50-50; online delivery means that all of the interaction and learning, whether synchronous or asynchronous, takes place online.) In conversation with a colleague who does the same work at the University of Michigan, I learned about the Blended Learning Toolkit, which includes an open online course to walk faculty through the process of creating a blended course. I try to make sure that I test out resources before I recommend them, so I decided I would participate.

My first impression was of the humility required. I’m currently developing two courses, one for graduate students to be offered in the fall, and one as a First Year Seminar to be offered in the winter. To be honest, despite my position of genuine advocacy for online learning, I have been really looking forward to being in the classroom again, face to face with students every week. I decided to use the course just to test out this BlendKit deal, but I was irritated at the thought of losing any of the instructional time I savor, talking and working and being with 19 students in a classroom. Humility? Yes, because I suddenly faced the challenge to my identity, purpose, and enjoyment that many faculty face if someone suggests they should shift part or all of a course online. It takes humility to try something new instead of getting defensive about the way I’ve always done it.

I began to work through the first week’s materials, still in my “reviewing resources to recommend to others” mode. Most of the materials were useful, despite some further irritation about having to use a somewhat kludgy first template, intended to help instructors align learning goals with activities and assessments. (I’ve already aligned mine just fine, thank you very much!) I still felt like it was an exercise because my students would undoubtedly get what they needed from the once a week class sessions. Then I looked at the second Venn diagram template and example, intended to help instructors identify which parts of the learning would best take place face-to-face and online. I compared my course design to the model the course provides. There was a gap. I asked myself what would sustain student learning from session to session. Of course, the readings and the writing assignments were supposed to do that, but those are solitary learning activities, or at best student-instructor interaction, and I wanted the students to continue the collaborative, student-student, discussion-based learning during the week. Suddenly my perspective shifted “from technology as a means to change the delivery method to technology as a means to enhance learning” (Kaminski & Currie, 2008; posted as one of the first week’s readings in the BlendKit course). I abandoned the template, which didn’t suit me anyway, and just opened up a Word document and began to write about the course. Seven hundred eighty four words of creation later, I had solved several barriers to learning and significantly strengthened the course. I’m still going to have the face-to-face time that I so enjoy with students, but I might actually reduce it–slightly–because I want to distribute throughout the week the time students spend engaging with the skills and content. (This is in addition to the time they’ll spend on readings and assignments.) I believe their learning, and our experience of the course together, will be better for it. It’s now a blended course, but I don’t resent it.

I’m hooked on BlendKit 2011. I’m recommending it as a resource. It is template based, so it might be most useful to those who are new to this kind of course redesign. Others who have been doing this work for a while may find the templates constricting, or may use them just as prompts for further reflection. Because I’m interested to hear others’ thoughts on the subject, and also to help you get started on the process if you are interested, I’m reposting the reflection questions from the first week. If you want to engage with the materials more fully, check out the BlendKit2011 website and join the facilitated class that’s going on right now.

Questions to ponder (reposted from BlendKit2011 under Creative Commons license):

• Is it most helpful to think of blended learning as an online enhancement to a face-to-face learning environment, a face-to-face enhancement to an online learning environment, or as something else entirely?
• In what ways can blended learning courses be considered the “best of both worlds” (i.e., face-to-face and online)? What could make blended learning the “worst of both worlds?”
• As you consider designing a blended learning course, what course components are you open to implementing differently than you have in the past? How will you decide which components will occur online and which will take place face-to-face? How will you manage the relationship between these two modalities?
• How often will you meet with students face-to-face? How many hours per week will students be engaged online, and how many hours per week will students meet face-to-face? Is the total amount of student time commitment consistent with the total time commitment of comparable courses taught in other modalities (e.g., face-to-face)?