Successful Blended Learning

In this 3rd post in the ‘blended learning’ series, we continue with Caitlin and Adam as they explain and explore the art of successful blended learning. Blended learning is still a relatively new way of sharing knowledge. The incorporation of an online aspect that covers the entire course content requires new things of both educators, learners, and education institutions. First, we look at strategies Advantage Learn uses to make the online aspect of their courses learner friendly. Secondly, Caitlin and Adam speak about their experiences with learners, and strategies that work best for those ‘learning how to blend’.

Making a successful blended learning experience

Caitlin and Adam both agree success in creating a blended course lies in a few key areas. These range from getting the teaching right for the dual-medium (online and in person) approach; to ensuring that the course is structured in a way that encourages learners to use all the resources.

Adam elaborates on the difficulties in the new approach to teaching. “The online aspect of blended learning is a challenge as you have to rethink about the way you teach. You could teach like you’re doing a lecture so you don’t relate on a personal level you just give information. Or you could try and teach to the camera like you’re in a classroom, presuming the student is going to make a mistake or ask a question. And then you need to balance what you’re trying to achieve, and pull the two together and ask some questions. Is there a point in doing online content if no one is going to look at it before you do the in person content? What is the point of doing in person content that covers all of your online content? You don’t want to just repeat yourself.

The joy of blended is if a student didn’t understand something online, they can relook at it and understand it with a fresh example in person, and vice versa.”

Caitlin goes into some of the strategies Advantage Learn uses to get students used to the new concept of blended learning

“What makes blended learning different is implementing the principle of ‘prepare before class’. There are clever strategies you can implement with online learning. With ed-tech, you can build the course to help guide learners’ usage of the material. We build tech solutions that have the human at the center of them. We know human behaviour means that you won’t want to do something unless you have an incentive to. Thus we can say things like ‘you have to do this quiz before you can even get that downloadable pdf which you have to bring to class with you’.

An example with AP maths. We run AP maths in person, and you go to class once a week, and you have 4 assessments a year. Two out of those four assessments are online, this is a way we try to get our students to sort out their login details, and make sure they have an AdvantageLearn.com profile. This ensures they sort themselves out because twice a year they know they have to be on their profile to take a test online.

Learners then see how helpful it is and how easy it is to use. They also see how much material there is and how much they are missing out on if they aren’t making use of it.

All because they’ve had a mandatory online assessment. So you can do some clever things with tech, which is one of the reasons why blended learning is so popular now. The concept of preparing before a lesson, like reading for a lecture, has been around for ages; but blended learning has not been that noticeable until the last 5 years or so.

So it’s a very new space but it’s a very exciting space, and very relevant.”

A valuable skill for the future

As mentioned in part two of this series, Caitlin emphasizes the value and benefit of being comfortable with online learning, in order to have a successful blended learning experience. “Students have to know how to do this. They have to know how to get material offline and submit an assignment online etc. If they don’t go and download or check certain information they will miss their assessments or important dates. So I like the fact that we are trying to get high school students into the correct mindset so that it is not such a shock when they get to University. This shock happens because: “It’s quite a new concept – schools are not really implementing it yet. So it’s a very special different type of student to be mature enough to take a new way of learning on board.

Online learning does take self-management.

It’s also a necessary thing, and part of all of our lives and you can really make it work for you.”

So how does Advantage Learn ensure that their learners flourish online?

Caitlin reflects on the many hours of thought that goes into figuring out the best way to structure their courses. “The challenge for us is: How do we engage with our students to get them onto our platform? The resources are there and they’re waiting for them, but they get forgotten. So we need to be smart about how we engage with students and bring them back to the site, and how to recognise progress and relay it .The curriculum needs to be designed so that it makes sense for online learning, which is a completely different way of designing material. It’s a different way of thinking, and often you work with educators who have been teaching for years and teaching in a certain way, and now you’re trying to help them think about their course in a different way.”

Adam elaborates saying, “The problem that learners have with blended is they don’t know how to use the information given to them; so when you sign up for a course you are told ‘here are your dates to attend and here are your 20 hours of videos online.’. Learners look at 20 hours of video and think ‘oh my goodness I don’t know where to start’. On top of that, the only person you’ve got to talk to is the teacher, who you know you’re going to meet on a certain date.

Depending on how the content is put online, it can be intimidating.

There is a list of, let’s say, 10 hours of videos, and there are 40 or 90 lessons to go through, and you have to somehow diarise that and schedule it. So what we try to help the students is to break it down. You as a student may think ‘I don’t know which videos are for me, I don’t know how to do a course – how to get from where I am at to the knowledge I need’. So what we do to help a student in that situation, is to really lay it out in bite size pieces so that students can go through it. Otherwise, learning online is very overwhelming – it’s like handing a student a textbook in class, and saying, ‘read it, the exam’s in 2 weeks’. You have to walk learners through it. The trouble with blended is that often people book a blended course a week before the actual in-person part. In that case to walk them through how they should best use the content can be difficult. So it’s trying to guide people – without dictating their learning – because everyone is unique.”

Blending successfully as a learner

So, now that you know a bit about the thinking and planning that goes into the creation and development of Advantage Learn’s blended courses, how do Adam and Caitlin recommend using their resources?

What ways are there to do a blended course?

Adam lays out the different strategies learners could use to approach a blended course. “One way of doing it is to use the online part to get a grounding and good understanding. This helps to maximize your learning when you have a teacher in front of you. The worst way is probably to get halfway through the online content, go to your class and then do the rest of the online content. You’ve had the grounding for half the content, the other half you’re completely blindsided with, and then you are just thrown out of sync. When doing an ongoing blended course, we seem to be experiencing students going online after the in-person lesson. So they come to a course, you teach them a fresh idea then they go online to just concrete it.”

Advantage Learn’s idea of the ideal way to blend?

Caitlin tells us her view of how to be a blended learning success story. “In an ideal world, a blended course would mean that you cover some of the necessary content prior to arriving in class. This could be for a couple of reasons; 1: there is too much content to cover in class (so the online content + the in person content = the full course, this is the case with our NBT Prep course) 2: Online resources used to learn theory and the in-person part to practice and ask questions. Whatever the reason or way you structure it, the ideal way, in my opinion, is to make full use of all the resources at your disposal. The way that makes the most sense to me is a sandwich approach: Online content ~> In person class ~> Online content.

Adam agrees that while that is the ideal way to engage with online content in a blended course, it is not always that straightforward.
“It’s hard to gather how your learners are using the course. Ideally, everyone would do the online part first and then the in person part second, so they come with their questions ready. However, the way we find most students use blended (because they aren’t used to it), is they’ll come to the in person, find it goes really fast as it’s all new to them, and then hit the online course afterwards. A student said to me, ‘the online is a reconciliation of your learning’. So she uses the in-person part to begin her learning, and the online part to concrete it.”

If you have missed the first part of this series you can find it here.