Page 181 - BLENDED LEARNING

the management of the centres would be handed over to the AFBiH). Secondly, it did
not require an internet connection which was not available at the time the blend was
developed in the centres. Moreover, REWARD (Greenall, 2002) was readily available
in Bosnia and Herzegovina; it could be linked relatively easily to the coursebooks;
the content was attractively presented; it appeared straightforward to use in design
terms for the students; and because there was little else on the market that suited
our needs if we were to address sustainability.

Self-study was comprised of eight ‘strands’ (my terminology) that were rotated across
a two-week period with Fridays being left as ‘free-choice’ for the learners. The eight
strands at pre-intermediate level are outlined in Table 1. The rationale for employing
different strands was to provide the learners with a range of task types to appeal
to a variety of learning styles and to maintain as far as possible their motivation.
The materials for these strands were developed from published English Language
Teaching (ELT) resources and coursebooks, or downloaded from ELT websites, and
worksheets were created or the book itself used.

Table 1: Self-study strands at pre-intermediate
Pre-intermediate self-study
Strands Weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, Strands Weeks 2, 4, 6, 8,
9 and 11 10 and 12
Vocabulary Monday Video Monday
Listening audio packs Tuesday Task work Tuesday
Campaign 1 workbook Wednesday Vocabulary wordlists Wednesday
Grammar Thursday Reading Thursday
Free choice Friday Free choice Friday

Complementarity
The content of the three modes was linked to a relatively high degree either by
grammar, vocabulary or topic. For example REWARD (Greenall, 2002), which was
used in the computer mode, was grammatically linked to the general English
coursebooks Headway (Soars and Soars, 2006) and Going for Gold (Acklam and
Crace, 2003) that were used in the face-to-face mode. Such ‘complementarity’
between modes has been identified as an important factor in blended learning
course design and we felt it to be a guiding principle in our design too. This seems
to be supported by the findings from a study into student retention conducted by
Stracke (2007: 57). The results indicated that one of the three main reasons that
learners left the blended learning course they were attending was ‘a perceived lack
of support and connection/complementarity between the face-to-face and computer-
assisted components of the “blend”’.

Timetabling/sequencing the modes
During the design process a great deal of consideration was given to the
arrangement of the timetable in terms of how to sequence the modes, the optimal
amount of time to spend on the modes, and the optimal number of modes to

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