Hybrids are not the only possible way of combining remote and in-person: another possibility is to combine modes of participation not at the same time, but in sequence.

rofessional development was designed using the Adaptation of Blended Learning framework to meet the new requirements of online schooling. Twenty-six teachers participated in the intervention of professional development, spanning six months.

Walmart Academies offers training online as well as in classes and in their stores, for its frontline service workers, covering both retail and soft skills. As part of this work, Walmart offers a video game called Spark City that simulates being a store department manager. Walmart Academies also has partnered with Guild Education to offer higher-level educational opportunities including for-credit college level classes

Blended learning: Efficient, timely and cost effective

Investigating self-directed learning and technology readiness in blending learning environment

Project Based Learning to Develop 21st Century Competencies

Based on the foregoing theoretical underpinnings, we consider that the social cognitive theory is applicable to the BELS learning context. Accordingly, three factors: learners’ cognitive beliefs (self-efficacy and performance expectations), technological environment (system functionality and content feature), and social environment (interaction and learning climate) are identified and elucidated as the primary dimensions of student learning satisfactions with BELS

If you are working in further education, skills training, vocational education, workplace learning, lifelong learning or adult education, these free online courses are designed to help you understand the benefits of blended learning and how to make more effective use of technology to support your learners.

We have pulled together some resources to help you plan the "flow" of your activities as they alternate between online and face-to-face sessions. This is arguably the most difficult aspect of designing hybrid/blended courses. We are happy to sit down with you and walk through the material below or feel free to peruse these resources on your own and let us know if you have any questions.

The Blended Learning Toolkit – created by Blended Learning Fellowship participants – helps instructors new to blended learning develop the necessary skills to create a successful and engaging blended course. The key to this success is planning and good design.  The resources below are organized around the four phases of course creation: design, develop, deliver, and evaluate. They have been created to help those new to the idea of blended learning become oriented to ideas and concepts related to blended learning and to guide them to helpful programming.

Research advances in learning and teaching over the past few decades provide a way to meet these challenges. These advances have established expertise in university teaching: a set of skills and knowledge that consistently achieve better learning outcomes than the traditional and still predominant teaching methods practiced by most faculty. Widespread recognition and adoption of these expert practices will profoundly change the nature of university teaching and have a large beneficial impact on higher education.

Explaining requires you to organize and elaborate on the ideas that you are trying to convey to your audience. Depending on your audience, you will have to provide more details and, thereby, engage in deeper processing of the information. On the other hand, if you are asked to simply retrieve ideas from a text, you may be less likely to engage in elaborate structuring or re-organization of the material – at least not to the same extent as preparing an explanation to someone else.

The "doer effect" is an association between the number of online interactive practice activities students' do and their learning outcomes that is not only statistically reliable but has much higher positive effects than other learning resources, such as watching videos or reading text.

Although unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that consistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process.

The results show that few studies offer learners control over the realization of the blend. Social interaction is generally stimulated through introductory face-to-face meetings, while personalization and monitoring of students’ learning progress is commonly organized through online instructional activities. Finally, little attention is paid to instructional activities that foster an affective learning climate.

In prior work, we found that different student choices oflearning methods (e.g., doing interactive activities, reading onlinetext, or watching online lecture videos) are associated withlearning outcomes [7]. More usage in general is associated withhigher outcomes, but especially for doing activities which has anestimated 6x greater impact on total quiz and final examperformance than reading or video watching.

The present research analyzes the application of learning gamification principles in online, open-book, multiple-choice tests in order to motivate students to engage in repeated retrieval-based learning activities. The results reveal a strong positive correlation between the number of successful retrieval attempts in these tests that cover content from the course textbook, and long-term knowledge retention as demonstrated in a live, final, closed-book, cumulative exam consisting of multiple-choice, labeling, definitions, and open-ended questions covering the content of both textbook readings and lectures.

Quinney et al. (2008 Quinney, A., Hutchings, M. and Scammell, J. 2008. Student and staff experiences of using a virtual community, Wessex Bay, to support interprofessional learning: messages for collaborative practice. Social Work Education, 27(6): 658–664. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar]), writing about the development of a virtual town called Wessex Bay, describe how a blended learning approach allowed collaboration to take place between dispersed communities of practitioners, cross-disciplinary student groups, and tutors using bulletin boards, discussion forums and face-to-face interactions. Using evolving case studies they were able to collaboratively develop the skills of problem-solving and case analysis within an authentic community of practice. West (2008 West, J. 2008. Authentic voices: utilising audio and video within an online virtual community. Social Work Education: The International Journal, 27(6): 665–670. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar])

A course design that optimises student engagement and moves away from a purely didactic approach should also encourage learning that has enquiry at its heart. Examples include encouraging interdisciplinary student groups to seek solutions to problem-based case studies. Savin-Baden (2000 Savin-Baden, M. 2000. Problem-based Learning in Higher Education: Untold Stories, Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press.  [Google Scholar]) argues the processes of ‘learning by doing’ in these situations can provide learners with opportunities to gain experiences of collaborative working.

Garrison and Vaughan (2008 Garrison, D. R. and Vaughan, N. D. 2008. Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines, 1st edn, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.  [Google Scholar]) state that effective blended learning requires educators to incorporate the following three key elements into the learning design process:•thoughtfully integrating face-to-face and online learning;•fundamentally rethinking the course design to optimise student engagement;•restructuring and replacing traditional class contact hours. (Garrison and Vaughan, 2008 Garrison, D. R. and Vaughan, N. D. 2008. Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines, 1st edn, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.  [Google Scholar], p. 5)

Work at CEIMH suggests that web-based technologies can help to overcome some of these practical difficulties and bring learners from different disciplines together (Skorga, 2002 Skorga, P. 2002. Interdisciplinary and distance education in the Delta: the Delta Health Education Partnership. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 16(2): 149–157. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar]; Juntunen and Heikkinen, 2004 Juntunen, A. and Heikkinen, E. 2004. Lessons from interprofessional e-learning: piloting a care of the elderly module. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 18(3): 269–278. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar]). Using the asynchronous collaborative properties these technologies present within a blended learning design has enabled us to help educators create new virtual spaces for meaningful interdisciplinary learning to take place (Miers et al., 2007 Miers, M., Clarke, B., Pollard, C., Rickaby, C., Thomas, J. and Turtle, A. 2007. Online interprofessional learning: the student experience. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 21(5): 529–542. [Crossref], [PubMed], , [Google Scholar]; Reynolds, 2007 Reynolds, J. 2007. Discourses of inter-professionalism. British Journal of Social Work, 37(3): 441–457.  [Google Scholar]; Quinney et al., 2008 Quinney, A., Hutchings, M. and Scammell, J. 2008. Student and staff experiences of using a virtual community, Wessex Bay, to support interprofessional learning: messages for collaborative practice. Social Work Education, 27(6): 658–664. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar]).

This paper seeks to address this dearth in the literature by outlining how the Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Mental Health (CEIMH) created a set of resources to guide educators through the processes of creating interdisciplinary enquiry-based blended learning designs (EBBL). The context and rationale for the development of a Blended Learning Design Planner and associated Resource Pack, and Design Icons are outlined.

In social work education, blended learning, a mixture of face-to-face and online interactions enabling collaborative and interactive learning, has been increasingly used as a curriculum strategy and provides the basic ingredients required to facilitate interdisciplinary teaching and learning opportunities (Cooner and Hickman, 2008 Cooner, T. S. and Hickman, G. 2008. Child protection teaching: students' experiences of a blended learning design. Social Work Education, 27(6): 647–657. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar]; Quinney et al., 2008 Quinney, A., Hutchings, M. and Scammell, J. 2008. Student and staff experiences of using a virtual community, Wessex Bay, to support interprofessional learning: messages for collaborative practice. Social Work Education, 27(6): 658–664. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar]; West, 2008 West, J. 2008. Authentic voices: utilising audio and video within an online virtual community. Social Work Education: The International Journal, 27(6): 665–670. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar]; Pack, 2010 Pack, M. 2010. Allies in learning: critical-reflective practice on-line with allied mental health practitioners. Social Work Education, 29(1): 67–79. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar]; Cooner, 2010 Cooner, T. S. (2010) ‘Creating opportunities for students in large cohorts to reflect in and on practice: lessons learnt from a formative evaluation of students’ experiences of a technology-enhanced blended learning design’, British Journal of Educational Technology, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 271–286 [Google Scholar]).

The academic benefit, evidence, and competitive advantages are clear; only the will and commitment remains. Blended learning can begin the necessary process of redefining higher education institutions as being learning centered and facilitating a higher learning experience.

There are a variety of possible explanations for these outcomes. In essence, though, we assert that it begins by questioning the dominance of the lecture in favor of more active and meaningful learning activities and tasks.

There is evidence that blended learning has the potential to be more effective and efficient when compared to a traditional classroom model Heterick & Twigg, 2003, Twigg, 2003. The evidence is that students achieve as well, or better, on exams and are satisfied with the approach.

The emphasis must shift from assimilating information to constructing meaning and confirming understanding in a community of inquiry. This process is about discourse that challenges accepted beliefs, which is rarely accomplished by students in isolation. At the same time, to be a critical thinker is to take control of one's thought processes and gain a metacognitive understanding of these processes (i.e., learn to learn). A blended learning context can provide the independence and increased control essential to developing critical thinking. Along with the increased control that a blended learning context encourages is a scaffolded acceptance of responsibility for constructing meaning and understanding.

The real test of blended learning is the effective integration of the two main components (face-to-face and Internet technology) such that we are not just adding on to the existing dominant approach or method. This holds true whether it be a face-to-face or a fully Internet-based learning experience. A blended learning design represents a significant departure from either of these approaches. It represents a fundamental reconceptualization and reorganization of the teaching and learning dynamic, starting with various specific contextual needs and contingencies (e.g., discipline, developmental level, and resources).

Blended learning is both simple and complex. At its simplest, blended learning is the thoughtful integration of classroom face-to-face learning experiences with online learning experiences. There is considerable intuitive appeal to the concept of integrating the strengths of synchronous (face-to-face) and asynchronous (text-based Internet) learning activities. At the same time, there is considerable complexity in its implementation with the challenge of virtually limitless design possibilities and applicability to so many contexts.

Teaching Adults:What Every Trainer Needs to Know About Adult Learning Styles

Instructor-Led Training

Effective Integration of Technology and Instructor-Led Training to Promote Soft Skills Mastery

The Benefits of Instructor-Led Training

Teaching with technology

to expand their pedagogical repertoire

Using WikitoTeach Part-Time Adult Learners in aBlended learningEnvironment

Learning Design Process

This study examines publically available guides, documents, and books that espouse best or effective practices in blended course design to determine commonalities among such practices. A qualitative meta-analysis reveals common principles regarding the design process, pedagogical strategies, classroom and online technology utilization, assessment strategies, and course implementation and student readiness

Chapter Blended Online Learning: Benefits, Challenges, and Misconceptions

Blended Learning is optimal because it supports multiple perspectives and experiences which are easily accessible over the web

In 1896 one of the Olympic founders, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, proposed the idea for a unified motto and symbol to reflect the unified International Community.

In this FLT article, I am introducing a new pedagogy I call the Pedagogy of Retrieval. This is the pedagogy I use to try to interrupt the automatic use of lower potential learning strategies in my flipped classrooms at The University of Texas at Austin, and it is built on the collective body of research and efforts of my colleagues mentioned above.

The central objectiveof this pilot was to examinehow adaptation ofthe new MIT edX 6.002x (Electronics and Circuits) MOOC-contentin a flipped model of teaching mightimprove student learning in a credit-bearing college course. Multiple objectives for this pilot included: (1) improve thedepartment’s typicalpassage rate of 59%for this course; (2)improve students’ retention rate; (3) shorten students’ time-to-degree; (4) improve the quality of the content of the course; and (5) reducethe prerequisite contribution for successful passageof subsequent courses.

Toolkit Elements

Creating Blended Learning Models That Work

The queue of electronic hands could take so long to get through that some students abandoned hope and lowered their hands while others got into the habit of raising their hand pre-emptively just so they’d have a spot in line if an idea came into their head later on.

Blended Course Design

Most recently I have been learning from two new-to-me online communities of practice – Wattpad for Writers and DeviantArt for Artists. Their online designs and supportive networked ways of working prompt me to continue thinking about the power of open ways of working in such communities.

We analyzed the relationship between students’ level of online engagement, and traditional learning metrics, to understand the effectiveness of discussion forums in the context of flipped classrooms.

Flexibility