BlendKit2014

That's right, folks! In my spare time, I've enrolled in a five-week, ill-timed MOOC that stretches over the end of the semester, which of course means that I'm doing this in addition to grading the Classical Argument Paper and facilitating my first-ever Digital Project assignment.

I'm nothing if not optimistically ambitious.

So: this short chapter asks some good foundational questions about BL, basically: how should we define it, what can we do differently in a BL environment, and how will we design it. The opening relies heavily on the excellent McGee and Reis (2012) article that I drew from for the BL Faculty retreat back in January. Most importantly, it ends with their call for a complete redesign--a transformation. Here's the quote I particularly like from that article: 

"Transforming blends are blends that allow for a radical transformation of the pedagogy, a change from a model where learners are just receivers of information to a model where learners actively construct knowledge through dynamic interactions. These types of blends enable intellectual activity that was not practically possible without the technology" (McGee and Reis, 8).

The key is that this radical transformation is not just about active learning; it's about active learning through activties not possible without the technology. 

As I've been maintaining for some time now, BL is not about convenience or saving on resources. It assuredly does not save on resources--not human resources, anyway. Instead, BL is about good pedagogy. I can do things in my classes that I can't do in a 100% f2f classroom. As I wrote in a recent proposal, some things are simply more efficient asynchronously--detailed, sentence-level peer review or critical analysis. Some things are more efficient in a face-to-face classroom: draft workshops, freewriting, problem-based group work. And some things, like information literacy lessons or concision presentations paired with guided revision practice, are more efficient online through Adobe Connect and Google Drive. 

The flexibility and affordances that technology provides is picked up later in this chapter, in the Kaminski and Currie section: "a course enhanced with online resources and communication tools will add educational value to any face-to-face course by making resources available to learners and by providing opportunities to deepen learning through dialogue and sharing" ("Can you make," para. 2). 

I am curious about this BlendKit, especially at this early stage, because I think that to an extent, it's extraordinarily difficult to grasp what a blended course might look like without a model to analyze. These two case studies at the end aren't particularly helpful in this regard. The first one doesn't have enough detail. The second one does, but the table that compares OL, Facilitated OL, BL, and Studio-based instruction is, I'm afraid, distracting. It would be more effective if she just focused on how she formatted her class without pausing to compare it to other models. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who went through a two-day crash course in BL Course Design at my institution, which was unfortunately not that helpful because most of the research and recommendations for BL course design is for medium and large lecture classes. In that sense, this second case study appears like it might be like mine (small), but she never tells us how many students she's dealing with, which is needed to understand how the disucssion forums and the f2f workshops are run. That said, the fact that she refers to one model as the "studio-based model" implies that she's dealing with less than 20 students, like I am in my writing courses.

Ultimately, both courses need more detail so that others can truly see how these courses work. This is what was missing for me three years ago in my crash course, and this is what is available in some of the literature. I understand that this is a MOOC, however, and it appears as though this has been designed for those with limited time to read scholarly articles. However, if anyone does, here are a couple I highly recommend:

Ginns, P. and Ellis, R. (2007). Quality in blended learning: exploring the relationships between online and face-to-face teaching and learning. Internet and Higher Education (10) 53–64.

Schaber, P. et al (2010). Designing learning environments to foster affective learning: comparison of classroom to blended learning. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 4(2), 1–19.  

​I'll add these to the Diigo site, if they're not already there, as well as anything else from my own Diigo Library. 

​I'm looking forward to the next few weeks!