Week 3:Blended learning

As the readings indicated, I can’t say what a good definition of blended learning is: mixing of instructional delivery media? Mixing instructional methods? Just mixing of F2F and online?
Last spring, I took an IST course that provided students opportunities to write their own research proposals and short research papers for preparing their dissertations. We met biweekly or once three weeks in F2F to check our progress and get some valuable information such as research methods or inquiry strategies. In other times, students posted their own paper and the revised version continuously on the SSF and the instructor and students interacted through discussion forum of the SSF as asking questions or providing feedbacks. I think, unlike traditional instruction, this course was learner-centered and increased accesses and flexibility of peer feedbacks. Differences with today are the course didn’t provide multiple options (such as providing different tasks or roles) based on different learning styles or personal learning pace. This means today’s blended learning has more flexibility than before, I think.

I can’t say what certain percent of a course should be blended. I think it depends on the content of course, characteristics of learners (such as age, fluency level of computer skills, learning paces, or learning methods preferences), environment, and so on. I think there still are issues: What is the blended learning? Is the blended learning appropriate to all of the learning settings? How to design effective blended learning settings?

(I would like to see the figures of the readings on Handbook of Blended Learning soon. ^^ )