Blended learning: Save Your Classroom Time

Blended learning: Save Your Classroom Time

Elena Arkhipova, PhD, assistant professor
Saint-Petersburg State University, Russian Federation

Blended Learning: Save Your Classroom Time

The very concept of blended learning is widely discussed nowadays. There are both enthusiastic and skeptical points of views, but the main missing point is we do not know what students think about blended learning and whether it feels more productive than face-to-face one.
We accept the definition of blended learning as ‘any program where a student learns partly at a supervised physical location away from home (such as school) and partly through content delivered online, with some student control over the time, place, path, and/or pace’1. Obviously, it implies that students learn partly in an online environment but the main point is this learning is under a teacher’s control. The system of blended learning means students are regularly assessed, and the good old tests play their important role, but ‘the key to the concept has to do with the "personalized" nature of learning: that technology makes it possible for students who either learn differently or have different interests to encounter material presented in a way that is engaging and meaningful to them’2. Whether we mention a fully blended course or just a web-facilitated one, we still mean something not completely traditional and not completely online.

Figure 1 (taken from Blending in: The Extent and Promise of Blended Education in the United States)3
Proportion of Content Delivered Online
Type of Course
Typical Description
0 %
Traditional
Course with no online technology used – content is delivered in writing or orally.
1 to 29 %
Web Facilitated
Content which uses web-based technology to facilitate what is essentially a face-to face course. Uses a course management system (CMS) or web pages to post the syllabus and assignments, for example.
30 to 79 %
Blended/Hybrid
Course that blends online and face-to-face delivery. Substantial proportion of...

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