Still blending?

Do people still talk about blended learning?  Or do we now take it for granted that any learning we do will involve blending of some kind?

Commentators point to 2003 as the year when the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) announced blended learning as one of the fastest growing trends in training delivery; some have also highlighted the fact that we don’t seem to have a widely accepted definition for what blended learning is – are we blending the environments in which people learn (e.g. online and face to face), the approaches they can take to learning (social, behavioural, cognitive), the types of activities they use, the types of media or what?

Or all of these?

I am not proposing that we adopt (or that we need to adopt) an official definition for blended learning but I do want to assert that there is no reason to restrict ourselves to looking at learning through one lens only and that when we talk about blending we should take into account every aspect of the mix – content types, delivery methods, media etc.

And that it does matter.

If we work on the basis that for people to learn effectively and sustainably they need to do different things (gather information, reflect, create, test…) then it follows that they need learning interventions that support different types of activity and that enable them to do all of these things with what they are learning.

There is also something about how people get engaged with the learning intervention in the first place and the idea of having different hooks so that people with different preferences all find something that appeals but this is not quite the same issue and also a bit of a don’tgetmestarted topic.  I am not the only professional in this field who starts to despair on hearing claims that if we “gamify” all our content everyone will naturally get excited about doing it.

The challenge is not about what blended actually means or whether we should blend but how we ensure that the blend is right and valuable for learners.  Looking across a wide range of contemporary learning interventions I see blending happening everywhere.  This does not mean that the term is not needed any more; whilst it may be reasonable to think of most learning as being blended, the need to ensure that we have the right blend is more critical than ever in times when we have so many choices of method and media available to us.

There are some great models around that can guide us in doing a comprehensive scan of the learning we are trying to facilitate and making the right decisions about the mix we employ.

There are also a few principles which are worth keeping in mind:

• Make room for choice. It’s about the learners and their decisions about how to engage with the learning, not about the providers and their decisions about how they want to deliver. People sometimes have attachments to particular ways of working with learning content that we might want to dismiss as being emotional rather than rational – to dismiss the importance of the emotional is to fail to recognise some real fundamentals of learning.
• Make it rich. Technology is an enabler, not a substitute. Many of the things we do today using technology are not just easier, cleaner or faster ways of doing things we used to do without technology – they are things we couldn’t do at all before.  A typewriter was not a replacement for handwriting – it created a kind of document you couldn’t create with a pen.  Document software is not a replacement for a typewriter – it does many things typewriters could never do.  The best blended learning is transformative, taking people to new places, not just using different methods of delivering the same material.
• Let them create. We are now in a place where, more than ever, learners can originate rather than just respond. Like blended learning, the term “interactive” is interpreted in many different ways by different people. Again, a broad range of thinking is good here – if a learner’s interaction in a single intervention appears to be restricted to uploading a video which shows them explaining or doing something they have learned to do, the supposed level of interactivity might be less important at that moment than the quality of the experience they have had which helped them learn. And this action could play an important role in a wider blend.

So, let’s move away from worrying about a definition for blended learning and what it’s actually blending. Instead, let us accept it is occurring all around us and turn our focus to facilitating the blend that is most valuable for our learners, and achieving that using the principles above

Some notes and references

Among the people referring to the ASTD comments on blended learning as a fast growing trend are:

Graham, C.R. (2006). Blended learning systems: Definitions, current trends and future directions. In C. J. Bonk, & C. R. Graham (Eds.), The Handbook of blended learning: Global perspectives, local designs (pp. 3-21).San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Rooney, J. E. (2003). Blending learning opportunities to enhance educational programming and meetings. Association Managment, 55(5), 26-32.

Commenting on the lack of a firm definition for blended learning:

Oliver, M. & Trigwell, K. (2005) ‘Can Blended Learning be redeemed?’, E-Learning, 2(1), 17-26

On the things that need to happen for people to learn:

James E Zull: Key aspects of how the brain learns in Johnson S and Taylor K (eds) (2006) The Neuroscience of Adult Learning, Jossey Bass

Gamification – while we’re on the subject – a really interesting piece of work on how fun when it is mandated can be anything but

Ethan Mollick and Nancy Rothbard, Mandatory Fun: Gamification and the Impact of Games at Work The Wharton School Research Paper Series, June 5, 2013. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2277103

Useful models.  Badrul Khan’s Framework for Web-based Learning has been used in blended design as well as eLearning and it is really comprehensive:

Khan, B. (2001). A framework for web-based learning. In B. Khan (Ed.), Web-based training (pp. 75-98). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology

http://www.academia.edu/259746/A_Framework_for_Web-Based_Learning

Many descriptions of blended learning models differ from Khan in that they emphasise specific approaches to the learning – some good examples in

Valiathan, P. (2002) Blended learning models.

http://www.learningcircuits.com/ 2002/aug2002/valiathan.html