Learn how to Enhance Student Engagement in Blended Courses
Perfecting the Blend: Designing Blended Course Interactions
It takes one set of skills to engage students in a traditional classroom setting. It takes another set to make the most of an online learning environment. How can one faculty member make the most of a blended course that combines elements of both?
Ideally, a blended course will merge the strengths of each teaching-learning format seamlessly, creating multiple opportunities for student involvement and interaction in different settings. Achieving this ideal, however, requires conscious and deliberate planning.
It also requires updated knowledge of the best blended course design strategies and interaction principles.
Discover the newest, research-based techniques for improving blended courses in Perfecting the Blend: Designing Blended Course Interactions, a live online seminar featuring Dr. Kelvin Thompson and Dr. Susan Wegmann.
Watch a brief clip from the seminar
Topics covered
This online seminar covers everything you need to know in order to maximize student engagement in a blended class, including:
- Designing interactions that support seamlessly integrated blended courses
- Marshaling students’ reasons for contributing to course interactions
- Increasing student engagement in the classroom and online
- Understanding why you must address interaction during the course design phase
- Fostering student-student and teacher-student interaction
- Implementing optimal blended design strategies
- Overcoming design and implementation challenges
- Creating ideal interaction opportunities in both teaching formats
- Collecting in-depth data for evaluation purposes
The presenters also draw upon and introduce the SCOPe process for evaluating blended learning engagement and includes sample course design documents to support improvements at your school, while giving you the opportunity to participate in illustrative interactive activities and ask questions.
Presenters
In a field as new as blended coursework, it’s hard to find specialists with years of proven experience. For this professional development event, we’ve located two of the best.
Dr. Kelvin Thompson, assistant director of the University of Central Florida’s Center for Distributed Learning, has collaborated on the design of hundreds of blended courses during his career. He developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of UCF’s Blended Learning Toolkit, and his research agenda focuses on how interaction affects learner engagement.
Dr. Susan Wegmann, associate professor at UCF, focuses her research on online asynchronous communication and is currently writing an online book that harnesses Web 2.0 technology for added interaction. She has extensive experience designing effective interactions in face-to-face and online contexts.
Who will benefit
Perfecting the Blend: Designing Blended Course Interactions is appropriate for all levels of faculty members—teaching assistants, instructors, lecturers, adjuncts, and tenure-track and tenured professors—regardless of their current amount of experience with blended learning.
It is also recommended for instructional designers, faculty developers, and instructional/educational technologists.
This seminar is now available on-demand or on CD. Whichever format you choose, you’ll also receive the complete transcript and all supplemental materials.
An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal website for unlimited access by the entire campus community.
Blended course designs have the potential to yield tremendous interactive benefits … but only if you know how to design and implement them effectively. Make the most of your blended courses by ordering a copy of this professional development event today.
If you have any questions contact Customer Service at 800-433-0499 or (608) 246-3590 or email us at support@facultyfocus.com.
Dr. Kelvin Thompson serves as an assistant director for the University of Central Florida’s (UCF) Center for Distributed Learning and a graduate faculty scholar within UCF’s College of Education. He has collaborated on the design of hundreds of online and blended courses over the past 14 years. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of UCF’s Blended Learning Toolkit. 
