Workshop Overview
Is your institution looking to blended learning as a means for achieving its mission and goals? Are you facing problems such as time to degree, limited classroom space, instructional resources for which you feel that blended learning may be the solution? Are you, as a faculty member or instructional designer, looking to blending as a means for enhancing teaching and learning? These issues and opportunities are bringing educators from all over the world together with the common goal of blending with a purpose.
Many institutions have been considering blended learning as a platform for introducing teaching innovations, resolving resource issues and facilitating learning for our students in the digital age. Blending with purpose requires that initiatives be strategic, purposeful and driven by sound pedagogy. Repeatedly, common themes emerge: what do you blend, where do you begin, how do you scale, how do you pay for it and how do you know if it's working?
This April in Chicago a Sloan Consortium workshop hosted by the University of Illinois at Chicago - exclusively focused on blended learning - will be held at the Renaissance Hotel. Administrative leaders, faculty members, instructional designers and researchers will gather to network, share promising models, consider effective practices and discuss assessment strategies. Break out sessions will center on three primary areas – administration, pedagogy and assessment/evaluation.
In order to maximize benefits, institutions are encouraged to bring teams.
Area of Focus
Administration
A strategic and purposeful approach to blended learning provides the direction needed for a comprehensive vision that maximizes resources and outcomes. As all administrators, deans, department heads and program directors who have tried to juggle competing priorities over scarce resources know, implementing a blended learning initiative without considering all stakeholders or having a clear vision and concrete objectives is an effort doomed to fail. As obstacles emerge – and they always do – following the institution's roadmap keeps the blended initiative focused on appropriate mission and goals and provides a means to assess progress.
Workshop participants who follow the Administration track will be asked to bring with them their institution's vision and goals for blended learning. Participants whose institutions are just considering incorporating blended learning, will develop a goals statement during the workshop. Participants are also asked to bring their foreseen or experienced problems to solve as well as their effective practices. No two institutions are the same, and no two institutions approach blended learning in exactly the same way. Whether the challenge is initial development or sustainability, the need for a plan or the tweaking of existing structures, the first steps of consensus building or a revisiting of policy implications, this track's collaborative consideration of effective practices will provide each participant with strategies that can be adapted and adopted at their home institution.
Evaluation and Assessment
Participants in this track will concentrate on emerging evaluation and assessment issues and practices when blending with purpose. Discussions will center on evaluation models that reflect blended learning's impact on the institution, the students and instructors - forcing higher education to develop second generation outcome models. Assessment considerations will focus on how measuring student learning is moving from objective, non authentic and non contextual practices to models that reflect interpretive, authentic and contextual approaches. Participants in this track should plan to bring and share examples of their efforts at evaluating and assessing blending with purpose.
Pedagogy
Blended learning offers faculty the chance to improve instruction. Blended learning offers new ways to present content, improve student communication, actively engage students, design assessments, and provide “real” world and service learning experiences for students. Blended learning gives students more flexibility in learning, more opportunities to practice what they are learning and more time for reflection. It offers students with differing learning styles more ways to approach and understand course content. Participants in this track will learn how to purposefully design pedagogical solutions to instructional problems and to map face-to-face and online approaches maximizing learning effectiveness. Faculty experienced with blended learning will share examples from their practice such as:
- Maximizing course and class learning time by using the blended environment for teaching/learning and knowledge application and practice.
- Learn how to plan activities for blended environments at the lesson/activity level. Learn how to plan and manage a blended course.
- Discuss the use of various online tools (text environment, MP3, Audio PowerPoints) in teaching and student information presentation.
Top of page
Web Privacy Notice
