In the past five years, the concept of blended learning has become widely accepted. It is generally used to mean a structured learning process that involves a mixture of learning and teaching activities, including e-learning and face-to-face or telephone contact.
The publication of The Undergraduate Experience of Blended E-Learning: a review of UK literature and practice1 at the end of 2006 provides a useful milestone in the development of e-learning within UK higher education institutions (HEIs). The report, commissioned by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and written by staff from Oxford Brookes University, reviews more than 300 studies of blended e-learning published since 2000 and includes findings from seven institutional visits and 15 interviews.
Not surprisingly the focus of the literature and the research is the ‘mainstream’ e-learning literature, projects and activities. For example, the interviewees tended to be heads of e-learning or education developers, and so the report is perhaps biased towards the views of individuals with an organisational overview rather than lecturers, library staff and others who are actively involved in the design and delivery of e-learning within their modules and programmes.
One glaring omission from this report is any evidence of research into the practice of e-learning associated with the work of librarians and information workers, e.g. information literacy. This may be covered implicitly but I was unable to find explicit references. I used the ‘find’ facility to search the 103-page report for the words ‘lecturer’ and ‘librarian’ and came up with the scores lecturer = 7 and librarians = 0. This is a real shame as there is much excellent research relevant to this study published in the LIS literature.
This feature of the report illustrates that, despite the rapid changes experienced recently in HE, there is still a silo mentality, with clear divisions, maintained by tradition, organisational and professional cultures, and workplace practices, between lecturers, library and information staff, and also education developers. Unfortunately there is little explicit evidence in this review of work from multi-professional teams or representatives of different professional groups in the interviews. Perhaps as a profession we need to focus more on dissemination through the publishing channels used within HEIs rather than our specialist literature?
The HEA report doesn’t provide a definition of blended learning but does state that existing definitions mention delivery, technology, chronology, locus, roles, pedagogy, focus and direction. These are characterised as follows:2
- Delivery – different modes (face-to-face and distance education)
- Technology – mixtures of (web-based) technologies
- Chronology – synchronous and a-
- synchronous interventions
- Locus – ‘authentic’ work, or practice-based vs. classroom-based learning
- Roles – multi-disciplinary or professional groupings of learners and teachers
- Pedagogy – different pedagogical approaches
- Focus – acknowledging different aims
- Direction – instructor-directed vs. autonomous or learner-directed learning.
The report observes that learning technologies strongly influence university learning and teaching practices. It argues (based on work by Derntl and Motschnig-Pitrik)3 that the use of the term e-learning is still strongly linked with traditional concepts of transmissive models of learning and computer-based learning. The authors suggest that the use of the concept of ‘blended’ is more likely to be accepted by academics for two reasons: it offers a shift away from transmissive models of teaching and learning; and provides opportunities for maintaining face-to-face contact with students, and learning through discourse and debate.
Nowadays teaching and learning within higher education is a complex mixture of experiences that take place on campus, en-route to part-time or full-time jobs, in the workplace, or in halls of residence or homes. Face-to-face experiences may include lectures, seminars, tutorials, workshops, laboratory sessions, group work, workplace activities, study trips etc. And virtual experiences vary hugely: downloading lecture notes from a virtual learning environment such as Blackboard or WebCT; searching electronic information sources; taking part in online discussion groups or assessed group work; questioning a guest ‘speaker’ in an online conference room; email tutorials; text messages with peers or tutors; and listening to podcasts of lectures while commuting.
The focus of the report on blended e-learning rather than blended learning is both a strength and a weakness. It means that the authors have provided a really good report on this area. However, I don’t think it fully represents the complexity of students’ current learning and teaching experiences, which perhaps a review of blended learning would have done.
The report focuses on the undergraduate experience of blended e-learning and recognises differences as a result of disability and culture, and those related to prior experiences and attitudes towards computers. However, it doesn’t explore other differences in any depth. For example, my own experience of teaching part-time students in two institutions, the Open University and the University of Hull, suggests that some students select blended e-learning, welcoming the opportunity to study where and when they choose. In contrast, many part-time students stress the importance of the social aspects of learning and really value their visits to the library. They want a learning experience geared towards face-to-face interactions (even though they then complain about the challenges of attending on-campus sessions and activities).
The HEA report considers research into international experiences of blended learning, and perhaps this could be explored in more depth. For example, the concept of an ‘international’ student was once related to a student who was clearly located within their ‘home’ culture and who was coming to the UK (or another country) to gain a degree. Increasingly, international students come with a global experience, i.e. they may have lived and been educated in a number of countries, and although this trend is more pronounced with respect to postgraduate students it is becoming increasingly true for undergraduates too.
It is probably impossible in a review of this nature to get beneath the surface of the subject and to draw out some of the real conundrums and challenges that exist in e-learning and blended e-learning. One of the subjects that fascinates me is that of time. There is a well-established literature on the ways in which globalisation, changes in society and internet technologies have led to new temporal challenges – summarised in the terms ‘fast time’ and ‘slow time’ by Eriksen.4 ‘Fast time’ is linked to the rise in ICT resulting in increased access to people and information through face-to-face and virtual channels. This ‘fast time’ replaces ‘slow time’ which is required for certain kinds of emotional and intellectual experiences.5 This brings new challenges to students (and also staff), who need to manage their ever-complex lives (studying, earning money and socialising, although not always in that order) and achieve some kind of work/life balance. In addition, it means that they need to build in slow time for reflection.
While the review refers on occasion to issues of time and e-learning, it doesn’t delve beneath the surface of this issue even though there are some interesting publications in this field (e.g. Land).
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Success factors for blended e-learning
The report identifies five success factors:
- Use the term ‘blended learning’. The term is generally accepted within higher education and it can be defined and owned in a way that is relevant for specific teams of staff.
- Work with and within your context. Blended e-learning is most effective when it is designed and developed within and for a specific context. Generic off-the-shelf approaches are less likely to work than tailor-made ones.
- Use blended learning as a driver for transformative course redesign. The best results are obtained when blended learning is used as a driver for course redesign that includes analysing the current course, obtaining feedback from stakeholders (specifically students), designing a new course underpinned by explicit pedagogic principles, and implementing the new course involving a continuous review and improvement process.
- Help students develop their conceptions of the learning process. Students are more likely to engage in learning and teaching activities if they understand the rationale for it. In addition, we need to make explicit our expectations, e.g. about attendance and participation in all types of learning activities. We cannot assume that students can learn and work together in either virtual or classroom environments but must provide them with the necessary know-how and skills.
- Disseminate and communicate results of findings. The report authors highlight the importance of disseminating the findings from research into an evaluation of blended e-learning.
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Institutional and practical reasons
Why use blended e-learning? The report highlights institutional reasons for promoting e-learning and suggests that they are highly contextualised within individual institutions: ‘flexibility of provision, supporting diversity, enhancing the campus experience, operating in a global context, and efficiency’.6 In contrast, at a course level, the reasons for using e-learning, while sometimes related to institutional strategies, tend to be pragmatic and related to the course or departmental context, e.g. in response to class size or student feedback, or as a result of the demands of professional bodies.
How can e-learning be monitored and evaluated? The report reveals that the institutions visited were all finding it a challenge to introduce institution-wide monitoring and evaluation practices. Three reasons are suggested: institutional pressures to introduce and implement blended e-learning are greater than pressures to evaluate these initiatives; the low status of pedagogic research; and poorly defined measures of institutional success in embedding blended e-learning. The HEA e-learning benchmarking project7 will, it is hoped, disseminate valuable findings in this area.
The review identifies three approaches to blended learning (discussed below):
- as a supplement to traditional programmes, e.g. the provision of materials and guidance through a virtual learning environment
- a transformative approach where new or previously existing programmes were designed or re-designed to integrate a wide range of approaches to learning and teaching relevant to the study
- the student’s own approach which is holistic and uses a wide range of technologies including mobile phones and iPods.
Librarians and other information workers are often involved in the first approach, which is apparently the most common approach in higher education. However, as mentioned earlier, this review doesn’t explicitly mention the role of librarians or information officers in developing and supporting this type of blended learning, although there are many excellent examples of good practice from the field of information literacy, for example. In the list of references (14 pages of the report) there is a distinct absence of evidence from LIS research into teaching and learning in HEIs.
The second approach is growing rapidly: as programmes are reviewed and re-designed, or as new programmes come on stream, they are increasingly incorporating e-learning. This is an important area for development and research activities. Unlike the first approach where e-learning is an add-on to traditional programmes, here e-learning is fully integrated and underpinned by a pedagogic approach aligned to the selected learning and teaching methods, and the course aims and learning outcomes.
Recently, I came across an interesting but highly irritating example of a blended e-learning programme (95 per cent e-learning plus telephone and emergency face-to-face contact) where the transformative approach had gone astray. I signed up for an HEI e-learning programme to develop my use of interactive whiteboards in information skills courses. All I wanted was some very basic ‘how to use the technology’ skills. Six weeks into the course I hadn’t seen a demonstration of a whiteboard working and was still involved in a seemingly endless round of introductions to help get to know my fellow learners. At that point I gave up and asked our IT technician to give me a quick introduction to our interactive whiteboards. He did this very willingly and I soon got to grips with the subject.
This experience taught me a useful lesson: it is really important in blended e-learning to ensure that the appropriate balance of different learning and teaching approaches are used on all courses.
It is the third approach to blended e-learning that I find the most interesting. How can we engage students in learning using their preferred technologies – their email addresses, myspace, weblogs, iPods, mobile phones and message systems? Many undergraduates appear to find the process of logging into HEI systems cumbersome and avoid it whenever possible. They may be concerned that big brother (or sister) is watching them as they use the institutional systems, and feel safer and more comfortable in their own spaces.
The HEA report reviews the current situation and (perhaps wisely) doesn’t attempt to forecast the future. However, it is perhaps our students with their holistic approach to learning who are leading the way. I recently assessed 100 undergraduate reflective accounts of their experiences of assessed group work. I knew from colleagues that these students rarely used the institutional Blackboard site for this module of study, and some staff had expressed concerns about their approach to and use of technology – ‘Perhaps we have a group of luddites?’
What I found was that students used technology in a highly sophisticated way which appeared to by-pass many university facilities. They were using their mobile phones and msn (and other) message systems, and some even established weblogs and wikis as a means of working together and producing high-quality reports. They used these technologies not only to exchange information, documents and files, and to plan their face-to-face meetings, but also to discuss and explore ideas and to develop and construct their own knowledge. Some groups appeared to have in-depth and potentially sensitive discussions with each other about issues such as working in diverse teams. At least one group never met face-to-face.
What I learnt from these students, probably a fairly typical group of full-time undergraduates, is that they are managing their own technologies and are resourceful and independent. I started to explore with them why many groups appeared to by-pass the university’s virtual learning environment. They wanted to use technologies that they controlled and found that entering systems via passwords was cumbersome. In contrast, direct communications via their own handheld sets was quick and immediate and enabled them to integrate learning within their complex everyday activities. Perhaps this is the future?
Perhaps we should now consider ditching the word ‘e-learning’ (after all we don’t talk about ‘p-learning’) and focus totally on blended learning. This would mean that we are open-minded enough to consider all approaches to learning and teaching, and to think about providing an appropriate and exciting blend of learning opportunities that enable our incredibly diverse students to achieve their potential.
References
1 Rhona Sharpe, Greg Benfield, George Roberts, Richard Francis. The Undergraduate Experience of Blended E-learning: a review of UK literature and practice. Higher Education Academy, 2006(www.heacademy.ac.uk/4884.htm).
2 op cit, p. 21.
3 M. Derntl and R. Motschnig-Pitrik. ‘The role of structure, patterns, and people in blended learning.’ The Internet and Higher Education. 8 (2), 2005, pp. 111-130. 4 T.H. Eriksen. Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age. Pluto, 2001.
5 R. Land. ‘Networked learning and the politics of speed: a dromological perspective.’ Networked Learning 2006. University of Lancaster, 2006 (www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/).
6 See 1, p. 3.
7 www.hea.ac.uk
Barbara Allan (barbara.allan@hull.ac.uk) is a Senior Lecturer in Student and Management Learning at the Business School, University of Hull. Barbara’s background includes working in and managing academic libraries. She has written a number of books for Facet Publishing including Project Management in Information and Library Services (2004), E-learning and Teaching in Library and Information Services (2002), and Supervising and Leading Teams in ILS (2006). In collaboration with Dina Lewis she wrote Virtual Learning Communities (Open University Press, 2005).