Blended learning

Blended learning is a way of teaching that combines online resources with in-person instruction to create a more personalized learning environment.

With blended learning, instructors often make some or all of the content available to the students outside of class-time.

Taking this to the extreme, students could consume all of the traditional lecture material at home at their own pace, and during class time students could complete work assignments traditionally given as homework during class, as well as other activities like team-based or project-based learning.

This describes the flipped classroom model, because it flips what students do at home and in the classroom. Typically when a teacher creates a lecture they have to make an educated guess about the knowledge level of their audience, as they have limited information about what each student knows or remembers.

If a lecture is too difficult, then most of the students will be lost. If it’s too easy, then most of the students will be bored.

So teachers typically end up lecturing to the mythical middle of the class, and hoping for the best. By placing didactic content online, students can move at their own pace.

Those who are familiar with the material can go through it quickly—even watching it at an increased speed! While others who aren’t as familiar with it can pause to take notes, rewatch it, or call up other resources to help them understand a concept being explained.

An additional benefit for all students is that they can choose to engage with the material when they’re most alert, which satisfies both the early bird and the night owl.

And those students who have disabilities can take the breaks that they need without having to worry about missing out or distracting others.

Putting work assignments back in the classroom also has a number of benefits from a learning science perspective. A lot of students describe the frustration of feeling like they understand a concept in class, but then being confused when they go home and try to apply it to an assignment.

This is also supported by research—we learn best through active work, not passive listening. Doing work assignments during class time means that teachers are available when students need them the most—when they are trying to apply their knowledge.

Another place where students struggle traditionally is with out of class group-work, because it can be hard to coordinate an in-person meet up as well as make sure those meetings are constructive.

Moving group work into the classroom setting makes the logistics straightforward, and it also allows an instructor to keep an eye on group meetings and to help facilitate them if needed.

An important aspect of all blended-learning environments is that they are not intended to do away with “face time” in the classroom.

Unlike online classes, where all of the material and interactions are online, blended-classrooms count on face-to-face interactions between students and teachers.

Instead of getting rid of these interactions, blended-learning structures are intended to optimize them—moving the teacher from a passive ‘sage-on-the-stage’, who delivers didactic lectures to a large audience, to a more active role as a ‘guide-on-the-side,’ who interacts one-on-one with students to help guide them in ways that would be impractical or impossible with a traditional teaching model.

By doing this, blended learning classes move from a teacher-focused learning model to a student-focused learning model. In a traditional classroom, the approach is generally time-based, meaning the whole class moves at the same pace—all students get the same lesson on the same day, and are tested on that material at the same time, and then they all move onto the next topic regardless of their individual exam performance or if they have gaps in their knowledge.

Blended classrooms are flexible enough to allow the use of a mastery-based model, which acknowledges that not all students are going to ‘get’ the material at the same time.

Some students might need more time to understand a topic, while at other times those same students will speed ahead. By giving students as much time as they need on a topic and letting them decide when they are ready to be tested, blended classes can help to ensure that students move forward only when they have shown that they can apply what they have learned with confidence.

Blended learning, though, like any teaching approach, brings with it some important challenges. Because this approach depends on technical resources, they have to be affordable, reliable, and easy to use for both the students and the teachers.

Often times there is also a learning curve that has to be navigated especially for those that have never used technology in the classroom.

Another challenge is making sure that the materials are being reliably and independently consumed by the students, and they’re coming to class prepared.

This can be incentivized by closely tying in-class work assignments to the content that is being delivered online, and can often be tracked with learning platforms.

Finally, one of the biggest challenges to blended learning is that it really changes the role of the teacher to that of a coach and puts students in the driver’s seat of their own learning—teaching them how to think as well as what to learn.

This shift is an important one and requires buy-in from both the teacher and the student to be successful. When done right, though, blended learning can lead to a much more enjoyable and effective learning experience for both parties!

Alright, so as a quick recap, blended learning combines online resources with in-person instruction, and one type of blended learning is the flipped classroom, where students consume their lecture resources at home and spend class time doing in-class activities.

This allows the teacher to change from a passive ‘sage-on-the-stage’, to a more active ‘guide-on-the-side,’ facilitating a student-focused learning model.

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