Teaching A Blended Course

Some say that Blended is the best of both worlds. The Blended course usually consist of online activities and in face-to-face activities. Faculty teaching blended spoke about 5 key points to make Blended courses work at our most recent Chat-n-Chew.

1. WHO : Community Building

It's really important to have folks introduce themselves face to face as well as online.
Retention studies have shown that students appreciate meeting each other to work and learn together.
Professor Schmidt noted from her research that the better the class gets to know each other, the more the familiarity strengthens the co-hort and "group think" approach to learning.

2. WHAT : Importance of face to face AND Online time

Students also need to see that what happens online is just as important as what happens face to face or vice versa.

3. HOW

Students need to learn how to navigate around the online portion of the course with each other on the first day of class.Students also need to see how important each modality is to the flow of the course.
Instruction needs to refer to the online activities when face to face.
Online instruction needs to refer to what happens face to face.
Review the online discussion when meeting face to face and show the discussion board and comment positively about students who participate to further a point.

4. FLEXIBLE

The teaching needs to be flexible to note when interesting interchange comes up that you want to note
or
something that relates to what you are doing in current events!

5. FUN

Spontaneous additions, Silly links or images that relate to the content or humor in your writing or face to face
helps remind folks that learning can actually be fun and that this is a life long pursuit. We might as well enjoy ourselves along the way.

The resources below will help you to decide which information to put online and how to organize them, and which sections should remain in class. Although this information is very helpful to the pedagogy of the course, it does not cover Angel. So feel free to view our Angel page after this.

http://www.blendedteaching.org/ A great resource for information on blended courses as well as discussion boards dicussing many aspects of blended teaching.


Pedagogical Information

Here you will find links on procedure, concept maps, and more.

Conduct Policy Guidelines Blended (Microsoft Word Document) A description of the policy guidelines for a blended course.


Article on Blended Teaching

Here are some articles discussing various aspects of blended course.

Questions for the Teacher (Microsoft Word Document) A set of questions Developed by the Learning Technology Center University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for teachers.

How To Divide Up Your Blended Course Here is an example of a possible way to divide your class into online and face-to-face portions using English 102 as an example.



Blended Course How To's

Here are some short how to's on how to get started with a blended course.

CLICK HERE to look at our Angel Tutorials.