What ingredients should be blended in ‘Blended Learning’? | Sunday Observer

What ingredients should be blended in ‘Blended Learning’?

19 December, 2021

“The sole preoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilisation.” – Jules Verne

French author/poet Jules Verne, a pioneer in the field of science fiction, wrote about an electric submarine called ‘Nautilus’ in his 1869 novel ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’. Twenty years later the world realised how futuristic Jules had been when the Spanish engineer Isaac Peral launched the world’s first electric submarine.

It took sixty-five more years for the United States to launch the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine USS-Nautilus. In his 1863 book ‘Paris in the Twentieth Century’, Jules wrote about mechanical calculators that could communicate with one-another over a network of distant connections. It could have been the first time, in recorded history that anyone had mentioned anything similar to the internet and networked communication.

Satellite communication

Consequently, authors such as Herman Potocnik (1929) and Arthur. C. Clarke (1945) wrote about satellite communication and space travel. About one hundred and fifty years after Jules’ imaginary network of calculators, the world started talking about globalisation, digitalisation, and digital transformation.

In today’s knowledge-based world we not only talk about integration of the business world but also technology-based education through online and blended teaching and learning methods.

The history of ‘Distance Learning’ goes further back all the way to 1728 when an American named Caleb Phillips had placed an advertisement in a Boston newspaper offering to send weekly shorthand lessons to prospective students.

Anna Eliot living in Bostonin 1880, offered instructions in twenty-four subjects through a correspondence school especially, to encourage women who were kept at home by conventions of the time, to study at home.

Online educational programs, as we know it today, emerged in 1989 when the University of Phoenix began using CompuServe to deliver courses.

When Covid-19 started spreading around the world in early 2020, all countries were facing the problems of finding ways of providing essential goods and services to their citizens while battling the disastrous healthcare issues.

One of the top priorities was to find innovative ways to keep physical and mental disturbances to the young generation of the world to a minimum. Almost all the countries focused on feasible ways of continuing their formal education systems.

Most institutions, not only, had to develop their own online teaching/learning portals using commercially available platforms suitable to their needs but also had to introduce amendments to their policies regarding evaluation methods and degree requirements in order to facilitate the online education under emergency conditions.

Some countries have started bringing in the students to their schools and universities and conduct classes and other activities with successful vaccination programs and precautionary measures in place.

Scientific evidence

Sri Lankan schools are open for students but not the universities.Perhaps there is scientific evidence that university students are more vulnerable to the virus than school children and therefore the authorities are keeping the students away from each other for their own good or the evidence shows that online teaching/learning programs, being conducted by our universities, have the potential to produce much better graduates than the ones that attended classes onsite prior to the pandemic.

Whichever the case may be, ‘Blended Learning’ has become a hot topic within this framework of continued distance learning in our universities since it can be used as a viable method even after students are allowed to come into the university premises someday.

Educators around the world have defined ‘Blended Learning’ in several different ways. However, a common theme in almost all those definitions is that: it is a formal education program in which a student learns along an integrated path combining face-to-face and online interactions with the teacher, together with any other tool they can use, technological or otherwise.

There are all types of different methods suggested by educators with fancy names such as: ‘station rotation’, ‘individual rotation’, ‘flipped classrooms’, and ‘enriched virtual’. Almost all these methods highlight their student centeredness which allows students to reach beyond the classroom at their own pace. Students then should be able to advance based on mastery not time.

Economic policies

Educators and policymakers in countries like Sri Lanka will have to seriously think about introducing such teaching/learning methods with existing course material, evaluation procedures, study streams and degree programs and the educational and economic policies.

For example: Would a child be able to learn at his own pace based on mastery (not on time) and sit for the scholarship, GCE O/L and A/L exams as and when he feels ready for the examination? Does the State university system have a process to provide opportunities to students, who could master the subject matter through a self-paced blended learning process, to follow a degree program of their choice and complete that at their own pace?

If the main idea behind ‘Blended Learning’ is just blending the methods of delivering the information, then it is not as new as people might think. There were all types of blending of delivery methods within the teaching/learning process even during the pre-computer era that used books, libraries, farms, factories, churches, and temples.

Using technology for the sake of it, or just because it is available, is not going to make anyone learn anything better.

Instead of taking notes and listening to the teacher, now the students can download the set of notes/slides the teacher is using and watch the video of the class later at his own time. This certainly will be very effective with self-motivated learners. In fact, the method of delivery is not a concern for the self-motivated learner.

Verbal communication

If one doesn’t work, he will find a different way to absorb that information irrespective of the type of blending the teacher, school, or the system is using. In the efforts of reaching the rest of the leaners, would a drop-down box on the computer screen instead of a paper based multiple choice question or imparting instructions within a WhatsApp group instead of a face-to-face verbal communication be enough to raise their level of motivation and open the necessary receptors?

Besides, as Jules has said, if the sole preoccupation of this learned society is the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilisation, then would future generations consider the outcome of ‘Blended Learning’ to be a success?

What if this generation focused on using a better blend of subject matter and deliver it whichever the way we can so that there wouldn’t be, Pandora Papers, killings in the name of religion, politics or economic competition, a necessity to remind about gender equality or Black Lives Matter, or exploding gas tanks?

The writer has served in higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fourteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected]

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