IT for Education

Blended learning as a term covers quite a wide range of possible interpretations. Integrating digital technology could be as basic as bringing up a web page in a lesson, or as integrated as every learner having a centrally managed iPad leading them through the syllabus. The more I've thought about this personally, the more I wonder if we even need to differentiate blended learning from other methods. This is not because there is no worth in the approach, but I wonder why we need to slap a label on it, when all we are really doing is moving with the times. We still teach in the classroom, we still give tasks to learners for outside class times. It's just the medium that has changed. When classrooms started having whiteboards and digital projectors installed to aid teaching did we give it a fancy name, or did we just see it as the progress of technology giving us additional tools to integrate into our lessons? A colleague of mine who was previously a school teacher when it ha...

In the previous post we looked at the advantages and disadvantages of the traditional vs. e-learning approaches to teaching. Here, we'll combine them into the concept of blended learning to see how well they can work together. Hopefully it's obvious that blending two established methods allows us to draw on the strengths of each individually, while giving us scope to eliminate the drawbacks of either. It's simple reduction: if a process works better in one method over the other, then use that method; if it doesn't work as well then don't use it. It sounds like an ideal scenario. In practice, the combination introduces some wrinkles all of its own that we need to be aware of.

If we're going to make our e-learning site as effective as possible, we'll need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of both elements of the blended approach . Let's look at each individually, then in the next post we'll consider how they might work together. Traditional teaching We've all experienced traditional classroom based teaching, it is compulsory for every child in the UK between ages 5 and 16 after all (Citizens Advice, 2017). As with most things we're told we must do there's an instinctive urge to dislike it, but what legitimate pros and cons can we come up with?

The surface-level requirement of our e-learning assignment is, quelle surprise , to build an e-learning environment for a particular subject (supporting a traditional course rather than entirely standalone). What we're talking about then are things like good supporting materials, points of contact for support and further information should the students want it, wrapped in a considerate, accessible interface. That's on the surface. Underneath that, what we're really looking at is one central question: how can the Internet advance the traditional teaching and learning process? That's more fundamental than just talking about content alone and requires us to identify where perhaps existing methods are found lacking and can be improved with the application of technology. Fortunately, there's already a term that describes what we need to look at: blended learning .