e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blended learning

  • Recommended Reading: Times Higher Education (THE) Reports on Student Views of Blended Learning

    Recommended Reading: Times Higher Education (THE) Reports on Student Views of Blended Learning

    Citing in-house research that surveyed over 100,000 students in the United States, THE reported late last week (see article) that students in exclusively face to face courses and students in exclusively online courses tended to give higher marks to their programs than those students taking blended courses that combine face to face learning with online learning. The report suggests that there is something about the design, implementation or execution of blended learning that is leading to lower overall satisfaction among students across several metrics that were tracked. For those universities pursuing some form of blended learning, and the list is growing every day, the THE report provides a launching point for new conversations around what is working and what isn’t working on their campuses.

    Blended learning is in its early stages and measurement and analysis are key factors that can drive improvement. As Mike Sharples, chair in educational technology at the UK’s Open University states in the article, “…the survey results do not show that ‘blended learning is a failure,’ but either that universities do not yet know ‘how to blend properly’ or that ‘there is a difference between what students say they like and what they do better at.” More data is needed, but this is an important conversation to be having.

    Snapshot of data from THE article.
    Snapshot of data from THE article.

  • MOOCs, Courseware, and the Course as an Artifact

    As Phil mentioned in his last post, he and I had the privilege of participating in a two-day ELI webinar on MOOCs. A majority of the speakers had been involved in implementing MOOCs at their institutions in one way or another. And an interesting thing happened. Over the course of the two days, almost none of the presenters—with the exception of the ACE representative, who has a vested interest—expressed the belief that MOOCs provide equivalent learning experiences to traditional college courses. Keep in mind, these folks were believers. They were enthusiastic about MOOCs in general. But they tended to describe the value of MOOCs as reaching a different audience than the traditional matriculated college student and provide a different value. They talked about it extending the university mission. By and large, they did not talk about it as being an improvement on, or even equal to, a traditional class. Now, there were well over 400 participants, so it wouldn’t be fair of me to say that there was unanimity, about this point or any other. But the level of agreement was remarkable.

    On the other hand, there was widespread enthusiasm for using MOOCs as essentially substitutions for textbooks in classes that included instructors from the local campus. Vanderbilt created what they called a course “wrapper” around a Coursera MOOC on machine learning. Folks from Stanford talked about the notion of a “distributed flip,” i.e., a group of flipped classrooms participating together in a MOOC. And SJSU talked about using an edX course in a blended course environment on one hand, and a Udacity course with Udacity-provided “course mentors” on the other.

    The obvious conclusion is that MOOCs are more of a threat to textbook companies than they are to universities. I think that’s true, but I also think it’s an oversimplification. There is a deeper (and older) trend to boil down a course into a set of digital artifacts that can be “played” by the student at will. It’s worth taking a deeper look at that trend, where it’s going, what’s useful about it, and what’s pernicious about it. (more…)