Collaboration and Blended Learning-- Expanding Classrooms and Interactive Options

A lot of the discussion about blended seems to focus on it is not one thing or the other. So, when someone signs up for an online class, they know what they are getting. And, if someone signs up for a f2f class, they know what they are getting. But, blended means different things to different people and often students may not know what to expect from a blended class, as the syllabus is not always available.

Perhaps one way to get around this issue is to offer two classes of the same topic, with the f2f time the same for both of them. Let's say that there is a a blended class that meets once a week on Tuesday and another section of that same blended class that meets once a week on Thursday at the same time (let's say 11:00 a.m.) as the Tuesday class. If both classes have the same syllabus and the instructors tightly coordinate their content, perhaps some students could take the same class by going to Tuesday and Thursday classes and having a f2f experience while others only go once a week and have a blended experience. In this way, more people would be comfortable taking blended classes because they would understand they could turn it into a f2f experience.

This might also enable participants to get access to two sets of fellow students. One of the advantages of online learning is that you can possibly expand your access to other students. A main advantage that students going to prestigious schools have is that they have access to many very smart people, including fellow students. In many of my classes, it was fellow students that expanded my understanding of topics and problem solving. I know this is axiomatic but by expanding the access to other students because online offers different things to different people than perhaps the quality of out of class learning will improve as well, since so much of the learning is taking place outside of class anyway.

We focus so much on good study skills and good teaching skills, but we might say that what goes on in the classroom stays in the classroom. Learning is a very private experience. Inductive and deductive thinking. If we expand our discussion outside of the classroom, where there is less privacy, can we identify what the characteristics of a good student/teacher are?

There are teachers and there are students and there are people that are neither. Maybe we might identify these as the learning personality. I was thinking of this after I offered to work with another instructor on a collaborative project. I knew her as very committed and dedicated. After several days, I received an email from her with a question that kind of underscored a certain barrier to taking chances with the lesson plan. I thought to myself this is not what teaching looks like.

Syllabi should be flexible, much like menus and evolve based on student need and instructor need and experience.