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Reversing the blend:
From online to blended

Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly

Introduction

At The Consultants-E, we offer fully online in-service training courses for practising
language teachers. All of our training courses focus on helping teachers to learn
how to effectively integrate information and communication technologies (ICT)
in a principled manner, in their face-to-face and/or online teaching.

The course
This case study looks at one of our longer courses, the Cert ICT: Certificate in
Teaching Languages with Technology, which is fully validated by Trinity College
London. The course itself grew from a shorter, four-week course that was the
recipient of a British Council ELTon in 2007. In its current form the course was
first developed and run as a completely online 120-hour course. We launched an
additional blended version of the qualification in 2009. In the blended Cert ICT,
50 hours of the total 120 hours are offered face-to-face. This is followed by the
remaining 70 hours being taken online.
Our decision to review a blended approach responded to the inherent advantages
of both face-to-face and online instruction:
Those who use blended approaches base their pedagogy on the assumption
that there are inherent benefits in face-to-face interaction (both among learners
and between learner and instructor) as well as the understanding that there
are some inherent advantages to using online methods in their teaching.
Thus the aim of those using blended learning approaches is to find a harmonious
balance between online access to knowledge and face-to-face human interaction.
(Osguthorpe and Graham, 2003)

Added to these general notions of playing to the strengths of each method, we also
identified a number of pedagogical and practical reasons for deciding to offer a
blended version of the course:
■ ■ The course content (the development of ICT skills) lends itself well to face-to-face
delivery, as tutors can physically help participants while they work with a range of
ICT tools, in situ. Although this is also achievable online, the process of identifying
issues and providing hands-on help can be more challenging online for tutors,
and require Skype calls, or developing screencasts to help with specific issues.
In this respect we refer to issues with learning and manipulating software

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