Page 74 - BLENDED LEARNING

and instructional design of the online part of the blended learning course can be
extremely time consuming and complex if you want to take the course beyond the
delivery of simple downloadable documents. Delivering any kind of online support
for blended learning can also be very time consuming for tutors as many participants
feel that an online tutor is available 24/7 and they do not have the limitations of ‘class
time’ to restrict access to their tutor. Calculating how much time to allow tutors per
student and dealing with student expectations becomes significantly challenging.

Moodle limitations
Many developers use Moodle as the platform of choice for course development
because it is free and has a powerful LMS which can track students’ online
attendance and levels of participation. Developing materials using Moodle though
can be very limiting as the platform tends to lack structural depth (though much
has been done to address this with the more recent versions of Moodle).

Most resources and activity types that Moodle enables have to be built from the
initial course landing page, which generally means that page can become very
long, difficult to navigate and slow to load. During the development of the Blended
Learning for ELT course, this problem was avoided through the development of
independent content templates which were built separately and then uploaded
as files. This enabled an additional structural level for the course, so that Moodle’s
internally constructed pages could be used as unit indexes and the initial course
landing page could then be a basic contents page. The use of HTML for the
independently developed template pages for the tasks also enabled a much greater
level of integration with Web 2.0 tools and multimedia online elements, as they could
easily be embedded into the HTML templates.
Structuring course delivery
When course tasks and units depend quite heavily on peer-to-peer interaction it
is difficult to decide whether to make units time-bound and only available for a
designated amount of time, or whether to make all units constantly available.
Making units constantly available enables participants to more easily and flexibly
manage their time in a way which suits them, but can lead to some participants,
who work ahead, having no one to interact with. It really becomes dependent on the
tutor then to monitor this situation and provide interaction for fast-moving students
as well as remembering to refer them back to earlier discussions as slower-moving
participants start to catch up. It is essential that participants understand that the
value of what they learn comes from the learning journey and the interaction with
peers, rather than from a race to the end of the materials.
Guiding principles and practical considerations
Importance of tasks – It is impossible to overstate the importance of active tasks
in the online elements of the learning. Passive reading or viewing materials that
require no action, interaction or reflection soon tire online learners and do not lead
to deeper engagement or learning. Tasks also need to be relevant and applicable to
the working context of the course participants and once completed, some form of
feedback from peers or the tutor is essential.

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