Blended Learning & Open Education?
Yesterday the Dutch E-Merge Consortium organized a Blended Learning Expert meeting, where all participants shared experiences on how they have implemented blended learning in their educational practice. The E-merge consortium consists of The Hague University of Applied Science, TU Delft, Leiden University and Leiden University of Applied Science. Two big Blended Learning Projects were presented: the E-Merge Blended Learning project and the TU Delft Blended Learning project).
Blended Learning definitions often adress the optimal mix of face-to-face and digital/online delivery of content and instruction in formal Brick and Mortar school structures. As you might expect, experiences shared were diverse in nature. In some cases Blended Learning was still limited to merely replacing knowledge transfer through live lectures by lecture video’s. This in itself is a nice start, since it often is a personal innovative experience for a lot of teachers.
But as I see it, blended learning projects provides teachers with the opportunity to go one step further and fully rethink how you can support your students in reaching the learning goals, by using the strengths of both different types of content, delivery methods and learning activities, be it either face-to-face or digital/online. The general opinion of the participants ultimately stretched this towards a more constructivist approach, where the new opportunities of digital and online content and delivery methods can be used in encouraging an active attitude in students, making education more engaging and giving control over the learning process back to students (control over time, place, path and pace – Wikipedia).
There is quit a similarity here with Open Education, where succesful usage is also based on non formal self directed learning. So, it might prove interesting to see if Open Educational Practices could be implemented in formal education. Scenario’s in which blended learning is applied, certainly provide good opportunity to achieve this. As long as students are really let go, given actual control over the learning process – even though this often lies outside many peoples comfort zone. And for many of the participants, although they agreed, this might still be a step to far. But they made/are making their first steps. And it is interesting to see where that might lead…
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