Page 56 - BLENDED LEARNING

Rationale of our blended approach
This blended approach was incorporated considering five key issues: administration,
instruction methods, flexibility, needs and wants, and infrastructure.
1. It was a top-down decision from the administration, but was favourably received
by EFL instructors. This could have been due to the fact that there was a small,
but new generation of EFL instructors who championed and led change and other
forms of teaching that were more up to date, and former teachers were ready
for a change. The administration’s demand triggered the integration of ICT in the
teaching of our classes. According to Graham (2006) this integration is known as
blended learning. He explains it as a teaching system that combines face-to-face
instruction and computer mediated instruction.
2. Graham’s (2006) definition of blend supports the University’s main instruction
method – face-to-face – while offering students more access to their learning,
which is something that we welcome in an EFL environment.
3. Blended learning offered flexibility in the learning environment, which was
crucial to our context since students learning English in the University come
from different majors and have different studying habits and schedules.
This is in tune with Brutt-Griffler’s (2007) view of e-learning that establishes
technology as a means to instruction and not an end.
4. Despite the fact that we used technology (tape recorders, televisions, and a
language laboratory with 45 individual workstations), instructors wanted to
include more authentic material and to communicate with their students in
‘their’ technological language in order to motivate them and to use different
methodologies that would be student centred. This is where the Department
started considering online, hybrid or blended courses and realised that blended
learning was most suitable. Graham (2006) argues that blended learning fosters
pedagogical methodologies that use interactive strategies, which, in our context,
instructors had pinpointed as necessary. These needs are what Waterhouse
(2005) highlights as some of the strengths of blended learning: fosters student
centred learning, fosters asynchronous and distant learning, fosters student-
content interaction, fosters communication and collaboration, makes course
administration simpler, and helps track student learning, among others.
5. Blended learning was desirable due to the limitations of the campus, because since
it is located in downtown Bogota, it cannot grow more and classrooms and study
spaces are limited. Blended learning seemed to be a solution when incorporating an
online laboratory, which would reach a larger number of students. This rationale is
aligned to Waterhouse’s (2005) and Brutt-Griffler’s (2007) claims above.

How the blend has been built
The idea of this project was to take a course that had proved to be successful and to
alter the teaching conditions for the instructors as little as possible at the beginning,
but to benefit the students. The outcome of the blended course would be the result
of gradual incorporation of ICT through an ongoing process, which has six major
stages, as shown below.

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