Blended Learning 4-Pack

Pack includes 4 video presentations, plus supplemental materials, PowerPoint slides, and complete transcripts • $299

Blended learning is one of the most important trends in higher education today, with a documented ability to improve student performance more than either face-to-face instruction or online technology can independently.

In this new 20 Minute Mentor Blended Learning 4-pack, you will learn how you can design a course that takes advantage of both worlds to create a robust learning experience for students.

Presenters Dr. Ike Shibley and Dr. Tim Wilson, both award-winning faculty members, share their comprehensive approach to blended course design in a series of four fast and focused presentations based on established pedagogical theory and shaped by real-world experience:

1. What Is Blended Learning? – Get an overview of how combining classroom instruction and online activities can transform student learning.
2. In Blended Courses, What Should Students Do Online? – Learn how Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning can help faculty determine whether to deliver content face-to-face or online.
3. Should I Use ADDIE as a Design Map for My Blended Course? – Gain insight on this theory-driven and reality-tested approach to designing a blended course.
4. What Three Things Could I Do to Improve My Blended Course? – Learn new ways to think about activities, technology and collaboration to enhance your blended learning course design.

From conception to design to improvement, this Blended Learning 4-pack is loaded with practical insights and advice, all for a reduced price of $299 – a savings of almost $100 if you were to buy the Mentors individually.

Learning Goals
These professional development programs will show you:

• How to enhance student learning with different delivery techniques
• How to use Bloom’s Taxonomy to deliver differing course content in the most appropriate format
• How to create synergy between face-to-face instruction and online activities
• How to increase student engagement in classroom sessions
• How to rethink the role of the teacher in learning
• How to adopt a productive attitude toward the use of technology in education
• How to find colleagues who can help you improve blended course design

Blended learning is here to stay. Add this valuable 4-pack to your professional development library so faculty members can implement blended learning best practices into their courses for years to come.

Order the Blended Learning 4-Pack

Want to make this program available for your entire campus?

Contact us about a Campus Access License to load the CD onto your institution’s internal web site for unlimited, convenient on-demand access to members of the campus community. The Campus Access License is ideal for ongoing group or individual training or to build a library of professional development material.

In Blended Courses, What Should Students Do Online?

Program includes a CD with the video presentation, plus supplemental materials, PowerPoint slides, and complete transcript • $99

A 2009 meta-analysis of U.S. Department of Education data found that blended courses, mixing online learning and classroom instruction, resulted in better student performance than either delivery format independently.

For college faculty interested in exploring blended learning, deciding which course elements to teach face-to-face and which to address through online technology can be a major stumbling block. Learn a framework for making those essential educational judgment calls in this 20 Minute Mentor program, presented by Tim Wilson, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario, and Ike Shibley, Ph.D., associate professor at Penn State Berks.

This fast and focused professional development session will help you make the most of the opportunities presented by blended learning. Drawing from Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning, they recommend:

• Using online technology for the lowest-level learning, before class
• Emphasizing student engagement during face-to-face teaching, building on the facts and focusing on mid-level learning skills (application and analysis)
• Pursuing your highest-level learning objectives through online activities, after class.

Watch a brief preview of this Mentor:

After following their step-by-step approach, you’ll be able to:

• Determine which of your lower-level cognitive tasks should be completed before class
• Describe activities suitable for drawing students into mid-level learning during face-to-face instruction
• Identify after-class online activities exercising the highest levels of cognitive function

Be confident that your selection of which materials to present online and which to present in the classroom for the best learning experience for your students.

Order this 20 Minute Mentor

This Magna 20 Minute Mentor includes a CD with the video presentation, supplemental materials, a critical reflection worksheet, a copy of the PowerPoint slides and the program’s transcript.

Want to make this program available for your entire campus?

Contact us about a Campus Access License to load the CD onto your institution’s internal web site for unlimited, convenient on-demand access to members of the campus community. The Campus Access License is ideal for ongoing group or individual training or to build a library of professional development material.

What Three Things Could I Do to Improve My Blended Course?

Program includes a CD with the video presentation, plus supplemental materials, PowerPoint slides, and complete transcript • $99

Teaching a great blended course involves much more than divvying up content between face-to-face instruction and online technology. Effective blended course design requires faculty to reconsider their role in learning. It calls for rethinking your approach to students, teaching, technology, and your colleagues.

In this Magna 20 Minute Mentor program, you’ll also learn new ways to think about organizing activities, make the most of technology, and work with your colleagues.

Presenters Ike Shibley, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry at Penn State Berks, and Timothy Wilson, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario, concentrate on three core considerations for improving blended learning design:

• Think about all phases of learning
• Deliberately seek out technology
• Collaborate

Watch a preview of the Mentor program:

After this professional development session, you’ll be able to:

• Explain why it is so important to coordinate learning before, during, and after class in blended learning courses
• Consider the multiple ways online technology can boost student learning
• Identify individuals on your campus who can help you with course design for blended learning

Whether you are new to blended learning or a seasoned pro, this program will take your course to the next level by exploring three avenues you can focus on for improvement.

Order this 20 Minute Mentor

This Magna 20 Minute Mentor includes a CD with the video presentation, supplemental materials, a critical reflection worksheet, a copy of the PowerPoint slides and the program’s transcript.

Want to make this program available for your entire campus?

Contact us about a Campus Access License to load the CD onto your institution’s internal web site for unlimited, convenient on-demand access to members of the campus community. The Campus Access License is ideal for ongoing group or individual training or to build a library of professional development material.

What Is Blended Learning?

Program includes a CD with the video presentation, plus supplemental materials, PowerPoint slides, and complete transcript • $99

Blended learning, which combines face-to-face classroom instruction with supervised online activities, is one of the biggest, most promising trends in higher education today. This 20 Minute Mentor program will show you how you can fuse the best of traditional techniques and cutting-edge online technology.

What Is Blended Learning? is led by two experienced and engaging professors — Ike Shibley, Ph.D., associate professor at Penn State Berks, and Timothy Wilson. Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario — and it explores the basics of blended course design.

You’ll learn how to:

• Use different delivery formats to enhance student learning
• Separate online and face-to-face learning goals, based on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning
• Employ online activities to improve face-to-face learning
• Create complementary face-to-face and online activities

Watch a brief clip from the Mentor program:

Drawing on real-world experience and sound pedagogical principles, this professional development program will show you:

• How “flipping the classroom” for blended learning can give you more class time for interaction and higher-order learning activities
• How using online technology can help students prepare for class and demonstrate their growing mastery of course content
• How to structure class time to maximize student engagement
• How to address institutional issues with blended learning

Blended learning is here to stay. Learn how to take advantage of online technology to better your students’ learning experience and improve your instruction.

Order this 20 Minute Mentor

This Magna 20 Minute Mentor includes a CD with the video presentation, supplemental materials, a critical reflection worksheet, a copy of the PowerPoint slides and the program’s transcript.

Want to make this program available for your entire campus?

Contact us about a Campus Access License to load the CD onto your institution’s internal web site for unlimited, convenient on-demand access to members of the campus community. The Campus Access License is ideal for ongoing group or individual training or to build a library of professional development material.

In the online seminar Ten Ways to Improve Blended Course Design, Ike Shibley, associate professor of chemistry at Penn State – Berks, explained how to successfully transform a traditional course into a blended course, and dispelled a number of teaching myths along the way.

“This is not the only way to approach [blended design] but I am going to suggest that you want to still use the face-to-face time as the central focus of the online time, and look at how you can get students prepared for face-to-face time and how you can help the students after they’ve been in class,” Shibley said. “So you start with the face-to-face and then think about using the online component for the other times the students interact with the material. In order to do that, you need to throw away all preconceived notions and start from scratch.”

One of the keys Shibley talked about was to use the ADDIE process to guide the design of your blended course. Here’s a brief summary of how to use ADDIE, which stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation.

Analysis:

• Review prior course evaluations for guidance on where students struggle.
• Identify the most difficult concepts for students and focus on those.

Design:

• Create detailed learning objectives. Use strong action verbs and avoid terms like “know,” “understand,” and “learn.”
• Divide course into F2F and online components.
• Match learning objectives with technology.

Development

• Start early – at least a semester, preferably a year, in advance.
• Create an ideal course then start with the most important elements in the next step.
• Create a shell with the intention of refining and improving over several semesters.

Implementation

• Start with a smaller course if possible (summer is a good time).
• Launch the entire course once completely designed rather than piecemeal.

Evaluation

• Assessment is critical for course improvement and accreditation.
• Leverage technology to collect data (think about this in the design stage).
• Utilize evaluation data to ‘close the loop’ to improve the course for next time.

In addition to using ADDIE to guide design, Shibley explained how to divide your course content in a way that creates opportunities for learning before class, during class and after class; how to assess student learning; and how to use technology to support learning. While the before-class activities typically introduce students to the content and include low-stakes grading, in-class activities tend to focus on higher-order thinking, collaboration and high-stakes grading. After-class activities then provide opportunities for working with the content, higher-order thinking, and grading in the mid-to-high-stakes range.

Watch a brief clip from the seminar:

Learn more about Ten Ways to Improve Blended Course Design »

Ten Ways to Improve Blended Course Design

There’s good news for college administrators agonizing over online learning versus face-to-face instruction. With a blended course design, you can get the best of both worlds, a synergistic combination that can help you reduce costs while improving the quality of learning.

Blended courses combine online learning and F2F instruction, and you can discover how to make it work at your school by participating in the video seminar Ten Ways to Improve Blended Course Design.

During the video seminar, presenter Ike Shibley, PhD, an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State – Berks, outlines and explains why blended course design is an effective option for today’s educational institutions, faculty and students:

• It solves physical space issues. With capital construction projects put on hold, blended course design can help you work effectively with the space you have, while allowing for enrollment growth.
• It enables students to work more and enjoy greater flexibility. Tuition costs continue to increase, which is driving more students into the workplace. Blended course design provides them with the flexibility they need to hold down a job while still pursuing an education.
• It provides today’s most effective education model. A 2009 Department of Education report suggested that blended course design offers the greatest change for student success in a course.
• It is an expected choice for a new generation of students. Today’s student is online, and expects their services to be on-demand. This is a format readily accepted and expected by new students.

Order the CD + Transcript

The use of blended course design allows instructors to imaginatively redesign any course to fit the needs of the learner, while reducing the space constraints of an institution. By the end of seminar, you’ll be able to:

• Decide which courses are good candidates for blended course design.
• Transform your current courses into blended courses.
• Understand which learning activities work best online and which are most effective F2F.
• Create a class guide to help organize the course.

Blended courses are the natural result of a changing educational landscape. With careful planning and an up-front investment of time and expertise, blended learning delivers a cost-effective, quality-laden educational model for the present and the future.

Watch a brief clip from the seminar:

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive the complete transcript.

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.

Order the CD + Transcript

Who Will Benefit
This seminar is designed for any college or university. Key staff members to invite include:

• Instructors
• Course Developers
• Instructional Designers
• Administrators

All seminars include a discussion guide for facilitators
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

“That’s one of the major pitfalls we see, but you really shouldn’t do that,” said Veronica Diaz, PhD associate director of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. “You really want to integrate those two components so we encourage people to take the time to redesign the entire course. In other words, break the whole thing down and reassemble it in the blended mode.”

In the recent online seminar Best Practices for Designing Successful Blended Courses, Diaz outlined a model for blended learning course design. The first step, she says, is to “modularize your course.” The modular approach creates a more organized structure, which benefits students, and makes it easier for the instructor to update and maintain.

The process of modularization begins with mapping a course that you want to design or redesign into a blended format to ensure alignment across course objectives, activities, technology used, feedback mechanisms, assessments, and other key components. In the case of a face-to-face course that’s being redesigned into a blended course that often means looking at what the instructor and student each currently do to support or meet those objectives, and then consider the different ways of getting students more actively involved in their learning.

Diaz noted that, unlike in most face-to-face courses, blended courses often have a better balance between what the instructor does to support learning objectives and what the student is asked to do in terms of interacting with the course content.

“A lot of faculty express that they often get some pushback from students, because in the face-to-face course, there’s a tendency for the instructor to do a lot more of the delivery and interaction with the content,” she said. “In a blended course, students are going to spend a fair amount of time out of class, and you want to make sure that they’re involved in the learning, probably in a much deeper and more active way than they were in the past.”

Another part of the redesign process is to identify and prepare for potential “student crisis points” – issues that may interfere with the learning experience. Crisis points include issues related to technology, a complex concept, or waning motivation. By being aware of possible roadblocks to learning, and informing students of them as well, you can often minimize the disruption.

Finding the Right Technology to Support Learning Outcomes

You have probably heard the rumors: Blended instruction can yield better results than traditional face-to-face courses. That’s right. Student performance will improve while costs go down. Only it’s no rumor. It is entirely true.

Blended instruction can save money and increase student success. Yet while adding online components to a course might make it “blended,” it doesn’t necessarily make it good. You have to make the right changes at the right spots to increase student learning and reap the benefits blended learning can deliver.

Find out how to imaginatively redesign almost any course in Finding the Right Technology to Support Learning Outcomes. Led by Ike Shibley, PhD, this seminar will help participants to optimize face-to-face classroom time by adopting and applying various instructional technologies. Shibley is a professor of chemistry at Penn State Berks, a small four-year college within the Penn State system. He has proven expertise in developing blended courses that focus on enhanced learning and that meet or exceed university performance standards.

In just 90 minutes, you’ll gain real-world insight on innovative yet practical ways to evaluate and redesign courses that improve student performance. You will learn to:

• Identify the essential components of a successful blended format;
• Revise existing blended courses and redesign other traditional courses to ensure optimal instructional design;
• Determine which learning activities are better accomplished in class and which are better accomplished online;
• Articulate the role blended courses can play in learner-centered instruction;
• Identify most appropriate uses for both online and face-to-face communication;
• Review and evaluate existing courses to determine when blended formats would be advantageous.

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive the complete transcript.

Order the CD + Transcript

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 web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

This seminar is intended for:

• Instructors
• Course Developers
• Instructional Designers
• Administrators

All seminars include a discussion guide for facilitators
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

Lecture capture technologies are not new to education. The enterprise solutions that exist are amazing and powerful. Tegrity, Echo 360, Sonic Foundry, Camtasia Relay, Wimba, and Elluminate have all had a hand in the market for some time and they all provide an opportunity for teachers to record content that students can access in a variety of formats and locations. Additionally, there are a number of free tools on the market that allow instructors to narrate anything on their computer screen are valuable tools in any classroom environment.

Changing classroom dynamics
One of the early epiphanies these tools provided was that students who missed a class could “make-up” the lecture and not fall behind. Additionally, students could review the lecture as many times as they needed to understand the material. Both of these scenarios are real and are truly useful to students. But I think that there is an even better use of the tools that I hope will have a larger impact on what happens in classrooms.

By capturing the lecture portions of classes and assigning them as homework, we can use class time to discuss the material and get any questions clarified. In hybrid courses this option is very appealing as it allows teachers and students to make the most of the time they have together to interact with the content in a way that a traditional lecture may not.

Teachers who teach multiple sections of a course in hybrid, fully online, and face-to-face environments may find the rewards of capturing lectures most beneficial. They can record the lectures given in their face-to-face class and use them as the homework or lecture portions of the online sections. Recordings of live classroom lectures often have a different feel to them than the ones that teachers record in their offices or at home, and typically require no additional work on behalf of the presenter.

Creating bite-sized lectures
While enterprise-class lecture capture system deliver impressive results when integrated into a smart classroom, more interesting to me are some of the free and nearly free tools available to capture lecture material. You can record 15 minutes of you talking into a camera and upload it to YouTube, for free. Products like Jing and Screencast, Screenr, and Screencast-o-matic are just a few of the many tools that can capture whatever is on your screen and share it with students, or anyone. These tools are often very flexible in sharing options and you can also store the content created locally on your machine and upload into LMS environments if you wish.

Talking to a computer screen takes some getting used to — the live audience makes us behave a bit differently I suppose — but for me, as an instructional designer, the benefits are quite powerful. One of the comments I hear from teachers is that they create shorter lectures when recording them from offices or home compared to capturing complete live lectures. And that is a good thing. People can only handle so much video online before they begin to lose focus. I try to get teachers to mix up shorter lectures with other activities. Perhaps 10 minutes of lecture followed by a writing or reading activity, before coming back for another short lecture.

This is one of the greatest challenges for instructional designers is selling the message of shorter “chunked” material in online courses when for many years we have based the classroom experience on hour-long lecture type models. Many instructors who were early adopters of lecture capture technology simply recorded their traditional lectures and added them to their courses. Getting them to recreate lectures and break them into smaller chunks with activities in between is not always easy.

Lecture capture technologies will continue to enhance the availability of online content for students in all course types and provide instructors with a means of sharing course content and materials with students. Our challenge as educators is to use the tools well, and in a way that will most benefit the learner.

Free Tools (just a few of many)
Screenr: http://www.screenr.com/
Jing: http://www.techsmith.com/Jing/
Screencast-o-matic: http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/

Enterprise Lecture Capture Solutions
Camtasia Relay: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasiarelay
Tegrity: http://www.tegrity.com/
Mediasite by Sonic Foundry: http://www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasite
Echo360: http://echo360.com/
Elluminate: http://www.elluminate.com/
Wimba: http://www.wimba.com/
Wimba and Elluminate are now part of Blackboard Collaborate: http://www.blackboard.com/Collaborate/

Todd Conaway is an instructional designer at Yavapai College, Arizona.

Results of the survey were released earlier this month in a report titled Trends in eLearning: Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges. The survey was completed by 139 colleges, typically by the institution’s distance education administrator.

Since the survey began in 2004, respondents were asked to rate the greatest challenges for their distance education program. For all six years, the number one challenge has been the need for support staff for training and technical assistance. The second biggest challenge this year, moving up from number three, is adequate assessment of distance education classes.

Some of the key findings of the report:

• 21 percent offer blended courses; up from 15 percent last year.
• 71 percent continue to increase the number of blended courses each term; up from 53 percent last year.
• 81 percent cap enrollment for online classes.
• 72 percent develop their own course content; 21 percent use publisher content.
• 40 percent charge students an additional per-credit fee for take online courses.
• The most difficult classes to teach online remain unchanged from previous years and include: lab-based sciences, speech, clinical requirements, fine arts, nursing, math, industrial technology, foreign languages, and computer hardware.
• 63 percent have mandatory faculty training with most saying that “more than eight hours” are required.
• 40 percent allow full-time faculty to reside in another city or state from the institution.

Access a PDF of the report Trends in eLearning: Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges, here »

For more information on the ITC, go to http://www.itcnetwork.org/

Blended courses offer a way to move beyond a midterm and a final. By combining the benefits of online instruction with the advantages of face-to-face instruction, you might improve learning in your course in ways that are impossible to achieve using only face-to-face meetings or only online resources.

I often hear teachers lament that there is so much content in a course that they never have time to do any critical-thinking activities in class. Moving lower-level content—such as definitions, simple exercises, timelines, and other strictly factual content—to online resources allows the teacher to spend face-to-face time on more critical-thinking activities as well as active and collaborative work. But a teacher cannot simply think of the online activities as a way to accomplish lower-order skills; otherwise, online work runs the risk of becoming an electronic textbook. Technology broadens the range of pedagogical choices so that step 2 in the list on Monday’s post requires even more background knowledge, more creativity, and more pedagogical savvy.

When I recently taught nutrition, I was able to guide students through the reading material in the textbook prior to class so that critical-thinking activities could be done in class. We analyzed food labels while eating different food each week: chips when discussing fats, peanut butter sandwiches when discussing carbohydrates, protein bars for proteins, and sports drinks for vitamins/minerals. The face-to-face activities were used to rehearse content from the book but also to help students as they worked on a higher-order assignment online. They reviewed a current diet book, based on the nutritional information they were learning in class.

When designing a blended learning course, the instructor should remember to use the online portion as an opportunity to create more exciting face-to-face interactions. Utilizing a pedagogically rich repertoire of online resources will allow an instructor to become the teacher he or she has always dreamed of being: the creator of dynamic classroom learning environments that fully engage all students. The power of blending online activities with face-to-face work can allow this transformation. Face-to-face interactions should work synergistically with the online activities. The blending of the two components can transform learning. But to accomplish the transformation, the focus must remain on learning.

Ike Shibley, PhD. is an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State Berks, a small four-year college within the Penn State system.

From Putting the Learning in Blended Learning. Online Classroom, February 2009, 1,8.

Many discussions about blended learning, however, focus not on learning but on blending. “Blended” is an adjective and “learning” is a noun; why has our focus been directed at the adjective? Do we assume, as is often done in the teaching paradigm, that learning is automatically assumed? I think that blended learning has become widely established enough that attention can now be paid to the learning portion of the name.

In higher education learning must be the focus—the push for learner-centered teaching is a noble, pedagogically defensible goal. Improving the cost-effectiveness of teaching should play only a secondary role. An instructor should not begin a blended design by asking how many face-to-face hours are really necessary, even though some administrators may use reduced hours as a starting point. The course should be designed to maximize learning.

Blended learning course design
In designing a blended course, a simple way to start is to imagine a discrete unit of learning, for example, a particular topic or a chapter of the textbook. Here is a three-step process:

1. Establish clear learning goals for the topic.
2. Design activities to help students meet the learning goals.
3. Sort the activities into two categories: online and face-to-face.

None of these steps is particularly easy. Writing effective learning goals is a skill that teachers must constantly hone. Designing activities requires a creative mind that is pedagogically grounded. Addressing the third step could be the easiest of the required actions but requires much pedagogical savvy. In considering each step, the following questions might help:

• What do I really want students to learn?
• How can I ensure that students read the book prior to class?
• What lower-level activities can student complete online prior to class?
• What higher-level activities can be accomplished during class?
• What higher-level activities can students complete after a topic has been discussed face-to-face?
• Which activities require a grade and which activities will students do because they can immediately see the link to other graded activities?

As small decisions are made about individual topics and the instructor decides the balance between face-to-face and online learning, the bigger picture will emerge. The teacher must start with small decisions then step back to see the picture that is emerging about the course, in much the same way that we step back from pointillism to see the picture that is created from thousands of small paint dabs.

Ike Shibley, PhD. is an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State Berks, a small four-year college within the Penn State system.

From Putting the Learning in Blended Learning. Online Classroom, February 2009, 1,8.

Muriel Oaks is dean of the Center for Distance and Professional Education at Washington State University. During the recent seminar titled New Ideas for Selling Blended Learning to Your Faculty, she offered an in-depth discussion of ways to convince administrators, faculty, and students of the value of blended learning, including:

When talking to administrators, point out that blended learning…

• impacts the entire institution.
• offers a learner-centered pedagogy.
• may integrate with the strategic plan.
• improves classroom utilization.
• can help match delivery to academic need.
• can help fill under-enrolled courses and programs.

When talking to faculty, point out that blended learning….

• gives them access to new resources.
• introduces them to online learning.
• is an opportunity for faculty development and lets them experiment with new pedagogies and techniques.
• helps meet student expectations and build student skills.
• allows for more flexible scheduling.
• retains the face-to-face aspect faculty may cherish.

When talking to students, point out blended learning…

• meets their expectations for utilizing technology.
• develops independent learning skills.
• offers increased flexibility and convenience.
• provides better access to those with job, family, or distance barriers.
• helps reduce educational costs.

Offering blended learning requires more than just setting up an LMS and telling the faculty to integrate it into their curriculum. Institutions must understand the variety of delivery modes available, investigate their potential audience, learn about the competition, and provide adequate support for both students and faculty.

New Ideas for Selling Blended Learning to Your Faculty

Mention the phrase “blended learning” to a group of faculty, and here’s what they hear … More work. Endless e-mails. A depersonalized learning experience. Their carefully honed teaching style tossed out the window.

You know that blended learning can do great things … not just for your institution, but for students and, indeed, for faculty themselves.

So how do you convince a skeptical audience that “blended” doesn’t mean “inferior”?

Our new online video seminar will provide you with a wealth of effective strategies. In News Ideas for Selling Blended Learning to Your Faculty, Muriel Oaks, PhD will provide ideas for winning over reluctant faculty and contributing to the growth of blended learning at your institution. Dr. Oaks, dean of the Center for Distance and Professional Education at Washington State University, has been a leader in continuing and distance education for nearly three decades.

Drawing on her extensive experience, she explains:

• How to develop your “sales pitch” for academic colleagues.
• How to effectively communicate the benefits of nontraditional delivery methods.
• The distinctions between blended and hybrid learning.
• How blended courses can become new revenue sources.
• How to establish best practices for developing and delivering hybrid and blended programs.
• How to help faculty build both synchronous and asynchronous elements into courses.
• How to determine whether a course fits comfortably into an “all-classroom,” “all-online” or blended delivery mode.
• And much more.

If you’ve been struggling to demonstrate how blended learning can enhance pedagogy without burdening faculty or cramping their teaching style, this seminar provides the insight you need.

Order this Seminar

Who will benefit:

• Distance learning administrators
• Course designers
• Institutional administrators
• Academic faculty
• Department chairs

This seminar will help transform your faculty members from blended learning skeptics to enthusiasts!

Order this Seminar

Now José Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, challenges this assumption by asking his faculty to put their lectures online and devote face-to-face classes to discussion. His logic is impeccable. Lecturing is simply delivering delivery, and not much different from reading a textbook in this regard. If so, then why must lectures be held in class? An instructor could just as easily record his or her lectures and put them online for students to view at their leisure. Better yet, the time freed up from delivering the same lectures year after year, course after course, could be spent putting together rich multimedia content that combines narrated PowerPoints, podcasts, Prezis, videos, VoiceThreads, etc.

In fact, why should faculty create their own lectures at all? Bowen notes that our system of faculty creating their own lectures is a bit like having every instructor write his or her own textbook. If faculty wrote all of their own textbooks, most textbooks would be terrible. Why not just use the best lectures that have been posted on iTunesU, TED, etc. for content?

I tell faculty that their real value is not the information stored in their head. After all, nearly all of that information is publicly available in books or journals. A faculty member’s real value is in their interaction with students. The back and forth with students in discussion, or commentary on their assignments to improve their writing, for example, is what gives them value. Faculty should focus on this aspect of their teaching and automate as much as possible the simple content delivery part. Yet most faculty have it backwards—clinging to their lectures as their most important function.

Teachers can test the waters of Bowen’s teaching model by putting one or two of their lectures online and devoting the subsequent class to discussion of the topics in those lectures. I’ve done this with wonderful results. But the secret is to avoid the all-too-easy mistake of falling back into lecturing during class time. As faculty, we think that lecturing is our primary duty, and it is hard to break ourselves of this habit.

One option is to assign students to come to class with one question about the lecture content written on a sheet of paper that the instructor collects to initiate discussion. To avoid embarrassment, have the students crumple up their sheets at the beginning of class and throw them around the room for 30 seconds. Then have each student pick up one of the pieces and start reading them in order to guide discussion.

Give it a try, and let me know how it works.

Resources
This video features an interview with José Bowen as he explains why he removed technology from his classroom, and the resulting benefits. Watch it here »

Lecture sites

• TED—Wonderful compilation of short lectures on interesting topics. http://www.ted.com/
• Free Video Lectures—over 18,000 free lectures. http://freevideolectures.com/
• Video Lectures—Great lecture exchange site. http://videolectures.net/
• iTunesU—Must download the player to access the lectures. http://www.apple.com/education/ipodtouch-iphone/

Feedback
As usual, I welcome your comments, criticisms, and cries of outrage in the comments section of this blog.

John Orlando, PhD, is the program director for the online Master of Science in Business Continuity Management and Master of Science in Information Assurance programs at Norwich University. John develops faculty training in online education and is available for consulting at jorlando@norwich.edu.

In an email interview, Dr. Ike Shibley, an associate professor of chemistry at Penn State Berks, talked about blended course design and activities.

Q: One of the findings of a recent Department of Education report is that students who took all or part of their class online performed better than those taking the same course face-to-face. What accounts for this?

Shibley: We don’t know for sure why students in blended courses outperformed students in both traditional and online courses. I suspect the explanation lies with clarity and motivation: teachers who can talk to students face-to-face on a regular basis can address any confusion about the course layout or the content, plus the teacher can constantly remind students about assignments due that week. The online components are quite helpful and can help students succeed, but it seems that when you add even an hour of face-to-face time each week students will have a clearer conception of the course and will feel the pedagogical pressure to get their work done. Having that meeting time seems to me a powerful motivator.

Q: A recommended practice for online instructors is to have every aspect of the course ready to go on day one. Is this also the case for blended courses? Where can you build in flexibility?

Shibley: Anyone hoping to teach a blended course should have the course ready to go on day one. Organization is of utmost importance because students need to understand the course design so they can achieve maximal success.

Flexibility is built in when students make suggestions such as due dates for online quizzes: during face-to-face time an instructor can poll students about any possible changes. Another way to be flexible is to build in that flexibility. If you have a course where an instructor can exercise discretion about what extra topics to cover, he or she can create a poll as one of the first assignments in which students choose the most interesting topics from a drop-down list. Then the syllabus can reflect those topics.

Q: How do you communicate to the students what to expect? Do you recommend structuring each unit in the same way? Why or why not?

Shibley: Students quickly acclimate to any organizational structure that an instructor chooses. They have learned how to adjust. What they will not accept is changes throughout the course. Once they plan to have an online quiz every weekend the instructor cannot say, “Well, it’s not done yet so you can take it on Monday or Tuesday.” Students structure their time during a semester around their course requirements, but if a teacher keeps changing times or assignments then students feel like they are shooting at a moving target and will quickly get frustrated.

I am a bit compulsive, but I do believe that students benefit from having the same structure throughout a course. The instructor wants to teach content and the best way to achieve that is through a course design that is easy for students to follow. Then students are worried about learning the material instead of trying to figure out when assignments are due or what kind of assignment they have in any given week. Consistency in design will lead to improved student outcomes.

When you undertake a blended learning course, you can’t just think about what assignments and activities you are going to move online. You have to reconceptualize the entire course. This means starting with your learning goals. The place to begin is by asking yourself: What do I want students to learn?

If you don’t start with a clear idea of your learning objectives, you’re not going to end up where you want to go. A theme throughout this white paper is the reminder to keep thinking about the overall goals that you’ve created for the course. While this is not meant to be a white paper on writing learning objectives, one helpful tip is to remember to use action verbs as much as possible when outlining your course goals.

Here are examples of some possible learning objectives in history, ranging from ineffective to very effective:

• Poor: Know the causes of the American Revolution
• Better: List three causes of the American Revolution
• Best: Given a possible cause of the American Revolution, provide reasons to support that cause

When you write learning objectives, it is very helpful to keep in mind how you might write a test question based on those objectives. Verbs like “know” are too amorphous to be very helpful. How would you test and how will you assess whether students “know” the causes of the American Revolution? The verb “list” is more specific. Students can write a list of possible causes to study.

Even better, though, is to think at higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. At the higher levels, you get the students to analyze a particular cause critically or provide reasons why something occurred. You have them do some evaluation or some synthesis using higher-order thinking. The more you can move your learning objectives beyond the lowest levels of thinking, the more you will improve your courses through blended learning.

Here’s another example of learning objectives, this time taken from a science class:

• Poor: Understand hybrid orbital theory
• Better: Describe the underlying construct for hybrid orbitals
• Best: Given a molecule, identify the hybrid orbitals and explain why they exist

Understanding a particular theory isn’t that impressive. Far better is trying to encourage students to describe some of the constructs, or better yet, apply them to an example. It would be fairly easy to write a test question based on the best learning objective here.

It is important to have learning objectives for the overall course and for each unit within a course. Naturally, they will be different for every discipline. You need to think through what you want students to accomplish and how you are going to know when they have accomplished it. This will help you map out your blended course.

With strong, clear learning objectives, you will be prepared and organized when it is time to begin moving some of those topics online. You’re going to be able to make informed decisions about which content to put where and whether to have them complete certain activities before or after class time. But it all begins with the learning objectives.

CLICK HERE to order a copy of the whitepaper Blended Learning Course Design.

“There’s a growing body of evidence that suggests blended courses really are an effective way for students to learn,” says Ike Shibley, PhD, associate professor of chemistry at Penn State-Berks. “Blended courses can actually lead to increased student engagement, not less.”

But for blended learning to work well for you and, more importantly, your students, it requires a fair amount of upfront prep time in advance of the course and the discipline to stick to your course plan. More so than in traditional face-to-face courses, Shibley says.

In the recent online seminar Organizing Blended Courses for Optimal Student Engagement, Shibley showed examples of the detailed “class guides” he developed for his blended courses. These guides provide explicit instructions on the activities and learning goals for each week, including expectations for what needs to be accomplished before, during and after class.

“In my blended courses, when they get to class we really hit the ground running,” he says. “They know they have to be ready to start learning as soon as class starts and that means putting in the work outside of class. When we meet, they’re more prepared and more engaged.”

They also get better grades.

Since redesigning his general chemistry course from a traditional to blended format three years ago, Shibley has watched the course average rise by nearly 25 percent. He attributes part of that increase to the fact that his blended course has more active learning activities that require more time on task. There also are weekly online quizzes, which despite being worth a relatively small percentage of a student’s overall grade, are surprisingly popular with students not to mention good predictors of overall course success.

Shibley offers the following tips for using online quizzes effectively:

• Have a quiz bank that will randomize the order of the questions
• Don’t make quizzes longer than one hour
• Use scaffolding questions with easier questions first
• Don’t ask too many questions straight from the book or notes
• Keep a consistent schedule regarding the opening and closing of quizzes

“A blended learning design is really a way to reconceptualize everything you once thought you had to do as a teacher, and it can be one of the most exciting times that you’ll have,” says Shibley. “I often hear that teachers want to get motivated mid-career … if you’re one of those faculty, this is an opportunity to really change a course drastically and, I’d argue, for the better.”

Organizing Blended Courses for Optimal Student Engagement

Time and space are at a premium on college campuses these days. Blended learning courses allow institutions, and students, to make better use of both. By combining the best of face-to-face instruction with online learning technology, blended approaches can reduce time on campus while contributing to better learning outcomes.

There are three times when students should be learning. Before class. During class. And after class.
Traditional face-to-face courses focus mainly on what happens during class. That leaves a lot of time underutilized.

In Organizing Blended Courses for Optimal Student Engagement, Dr. Ike Shibley of Penn State will inspire professors to think about how to use blended courses to more actively involve students with the course material.

In this 90-minute session, Dr. Shibley presents the specific strategies he recommends using with students before class meetings, during class time and after class is over.

Order this seminar

This seminar covers:

• Preparing class guides that help students learn prior to class
• Using student response systems to create a more active classroom
• Writing quiz questions to increase rehearsal and involvement with course material
• Ways to reach higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy with clicker questions
• Teaching challenges for before, during, and after class
• How blended learning makes assessment easier

Who will benefit?

This seminar is designed for college educators and for those who train and supervise faculty members, including:

• Instructors
• Course Developers
• Instructional Designers
• Administrators

There’s never been a better time for blended learning. Prepare for the upcoming semester by enrolling in this strategy-filled seminar today.

Order this seminar

Authored by Dr. Curtis J. Bonk, professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana University, The World is Open provides an enthusiastic and in-depth look at how the convergence of free web content and courses, increasingly fast access to content, and the creation of a participatory learning culture are causing a dramatic shift in how people learn.

In the book, Professor Bonk outlines 10 key technology trends to show how technology has transformed educational opportunities for learners of every age and at every location around the world.

Organized under the acronym WE-ALL-LEARN, Professor Bonk explores how the following technology trends are contributing to the open learning world:
W – Web searching in the world of e-books
E – e-Learning and blended learning

A – Availability of open source and free software
L – Leveraged resources and OpenCourseWare
L – Learning object repositories and portals

L – Learner participation in open information communities
E – Electronic collaboration
A – Alternate reality learning
R – Real-time mobility and portability
N – Networks of personalized learning

“What was accomplished previously with textbooks and classroom lectures has shifted to other resources and learning technologies. This shift effectively frees up face-to-face classroom time for addressing personal needs. With such personalization, it is truly the age of learner-centered and empowered learning.” (p. 11)

The World is Open is the result of more than two decades of research on e-learning, blended learning and technology in education, but it’s far from dry. Quite the contrary, the book is packed with descriptive anecdotes, insightful interviews, and compelling commentary that will keep readers fully engaged.

Reference:
Bonk, Curtis. 2009. The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education. Jossey-Bass.