At the beginning of our distance course we were given the premise that distance learning should not just be different than, or as good as F2F learning, but that it should be better. In an article on Blended Learning, Garrison believes that blended learning can accomplish this. He states that the challenge of blended learning is not just to add technology to existing F2F experiences to but fundamentally rethink how we go about teaching. He states that some kinds of learning take place better in asynchronous environments. For example, he thinks that dialogue can be improved in some ways if it is written asynchronously (providing reflection time). Building sociality perhaps is done better face to face. With blended learning we have the opportunity to critically think about what really promotes learning and design a system where this takes place. I've only done this first reading so far, but I look forward to studying blended learning more.
Two thoughts that I had after reading the article--one was to read what wikipedia has to say about blended learning. From what I read, I thought a fun class project might be to update the wikipedia entry.
A second thought I had was that it is a little surprising if, as Garrison says, blended learning is "inevitable" that I have experienced so little blended learning in my Ph.D program, in a fairly progessive department. I'm not saying this to be critical of the theory, nor the department, I just think that this illustration shows that it may be more complex to do blended learning right than first meets the eye. More posts on this topic to come.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
6 comments:
great idea to update the wikipedia entry . . .
What ideas do you have about how BL could be incorporated into the courses that you have already taken in the program?
One of the notes I made while reading the Garrison article was whether or not we have made the 'inevitable' jump that he talks of and you criticize. I see online becoming more and more used, but I have to agree with you that I don't think it's been as rapid a takeover as people might have wanted half a decade ago.
That said, Garrison does point out that Academia is very slow to change, so perhaps we're not the best example. I wonder how online and blended learning has changed in other areas of education (e.g., corporate training)? Charles, do you know the answer to this?
I need to modify what I wrote about the lack of blendedness in courses I have had. After reading the rest of the articles for today, and understanding more about the broad definition of "blended" I think there many of my classes have taken advantage of blended opportunities. However, as Charles wrote, and Peter alludes to the pace of this change and transforming nature of it still need to be discussed. I'm looking forward to tonight's class.
For me, this class is the ONLY class that I can think of that has been blended that I have taken as a student. I have also taught one truly blended class. I disagree with Garrison that it is inevitable, but I think that it is probably a positive thing to do in many cases in higher education. I can see cost effectiveness issues and also some learning affectiveness and some student satisfaction issues that can be positively addressed with blended approaches. The problem I see in discussing blended learning is that by definition it is a vague topic, and should not be strictly modelled. You could have a little amount of blend or a larger amount of blend, or the types of teaching you are blending can be varied. It seems to me to be counter productive to try and provide a model for something so flexible. I would prefer to see better models for education in general, and maybe a good model for applying general teaching rules to different situations that helps a designer or instructor by giving them some logical options to choose from based on their unique circumstances and context. As I stated on my own blog, one thing that is missing from research is data showing what is so good about close proximity face to face education. Without this, it seems to me that it is difficult to state that designers should create a certain amount of face to face in a blended class in some given context. So until all different varieties of education are shown to be useful in various circumstances, how can we state that blending in any particular manner is a good idea? Bring on the debate! (If my ramblings make any sense!)
Last year some of my colleagues took off to visit various corporations and training facilities with the goal to look at the technology (including furniture). Something interesting was found at Oregon State Health University. They were video conferencing their lectures and other learning activities. They had a VC unit on a glorified IV poll and were integrating students from a lot of different locations including intra-campus locations so students had flexibility and could chose to go to class from somewhere else or watch the VC recording. The students used it and loved it and my friends were pretty impressed. I thought it was a good example of having a small blend of distance education.
Mike said "It seems to me to be counter productive to try and provide a model for something so flexible. I would prefer to see better models for education in general, and maybe a good model for applying general teaching rules to different situations that helps a designer or instructor by giving them some logical options to choose from based on their unique circumstances and context."
I just have to say that I disagree with his statement. In my mind models are good and we should provide lots of models. Much of what we learn is from seeing models.
There is some risk to providing only one or a limited number of models because some people may think that they are rigid and not flexible.
Post a Comment