The blended learning imperative

Elliott Masie

ll learning is blended learning! That is a bold statement and reflects our view of the definition of blended learning: the use of two or more styles of content or context delivery or discovery.

In 1998, the training field popularized the term blended learning to refer to the mixture of e-learning and classroom learning. Many people started to use it as a way of addressing what they perceived to be the structural weaknesses of e-learning at that time, mainly in its limited ability to foster interaction, context, and remediation.

However, blended learning has always been a major part of the landscape of training, learning, and instruction. Think back to your best class in college. The faculty member often used a pedagogical approach that might have included:

Formal lectures

Classroom discussion

Homework or reading assignments

Development of papers

Group projects

Assessments or exams

One-to-one coaching during office hours

The Blended Learning Imperative

In addition, the learners made the blend even richer with the following strategies:

• Conversations between peers

• Sharing notes

• Study sessions

• Library research

• Checking with former students about exams or grading models

Why all of these elements? Because as complex beings, we don't learn in a simple or uniform fashion. Even when all learning seems to be confined to a sin­gle delivery system, such as a classroom or an online class, learners often break out of those confines and independently enrich the material.

Reasons for Creating Blended Learning

Learners and their teachers and trainers have always created overt or covert blended learning for many compelling reasons. We look at seven of them.

Multiple Perspectives on Content

Learners are a varied group of individuals and have a varied set of learning styles. They seem to achieve higher mastery of content when they can take mul­tiple passes through the material and deal with it through different learning processes.

Cognitive Rehearsal

David and Roger Johnson, pioneers of collaborative education in the K-12 space, termed the phrase cognitive rehearsal to refer to the process by which learners mas­ter newly presented material by talking about the content (Johnson & Johnson, 1985). For example, a colleague comes back from a management class and talks to her spouse or cubicle mate about the newly acquired content. Ironically, the value of this conversation is often richer for the speaker than the listener. Johnson and Johnson have often referred to this as " hearing the content for the second time from your own lips." We see this often in the e-learning world as learners push back from their terminals and start to discuss the screen-based material with a neighbor.

The Handbook of Blended Learning

Context Is Often More Important Than Content

I am a strong proponent of the vital need to raise the status of and recognition for context. It is easy to author and deliver content. Most e-learning is filled with or­ganizationally approved content. Yet learners have an incredible thirst and in­structional need for context, the unofficial and peer-validated view of the authored content. The classroom instructor delivers the content as reflected in the Power­Point slides or courseware. Then she takes a few steps to the right or left of the podium and tells the story about how the content is really being implemented, and that is what people remember. One of the key values that face-to-face or other in­teractions have in the blended learning model is the ability to add context.

Value Sorting Is Core to Blended Learning

One of the behaviors that the learner is always struggling through is their need to sort the content by value. There are three general sorting categories:

High-value stuff: The content and context that I need to remember, even memorize. It is what I take away from this learning activity.

Medium-value stuff: The content and context that I might need to use at some future date. I will become familiar with it but won't memorize it. I know how to get to it when and if I need it.

No-value stuff: The content that I don't need and won't bother to learn or think about.

Blended learning provides a richer environment for learners to make these decisions. In fact, instructional designers often are in denial about this core sort­ing process and naively believe that all content is equally important. One of the prime drivers from the learner point of view toward blended learning is the need to reduce and target learning objectives and activities. Multiple processes and models increase the learner's ability to sort.

Learning Is Longitudinal

Much of the dialogue about e-learning has been about the acceleration and com­pression of learning time. A clear benefit of e-learning can be to accelerate the access of a learner to knowledge. Yet sometimes we have to accept that learning is accomplished over time. The blended learning model fits nicely into this lon­gitudinal view of knowledge acquisition. A learner will learn computer security techniques over a period of weeks or months, mixing formal and informal bursts of training. What we have to work on is to make our assessment and evaluation

The Blended Learning Imperative

processes more aligned to longitudinal learning. Let's move beyond testing for competency at the end of a short module. Why not shift the assessment to a more object-based and over-time paradigm?

i Learning Is Social

As humans, we thrive on social experiences, and learning is one of those very pri­mal social experiences. Yet the role of a student is often structured to be quite unsocial. We often see the student as a passive viewer of slides, listener of lectures, screen and mouse clicker, or quiet taker of evaluations. Blended learning recog­nizes and aligns with the social dimensions of learning.

Learning Is Often Tacit and Unstructured

Some of the most powerful training experiences are often unconventional and not in the common tool kit of an instructional designer. Consider a lunch conversation. A new manager wHl probably get more value and learning from a targeted invita­tion to have lunch with a senior mentor than from several hours in a class or several modules in an e-learning course. When we expand our thinking about blended learn­ing, we recognize that these experiences are a big piece of the mix. We can take a great online course and add invitations to lunch, tours of the factory, open structured online searches, and other nontraditional elements to supercharge the learning.

Conclusion

I started to use the phrase " magic is in the mix" when blended learning became pop­ular as a term in the 1990s. The magic is the power of adding two or more learn­ing elements. Learners have always known this. They have been blended learning for thousands of years. They add what is missing, they mix it with what they need, and they subtract what is not valuable. They socialize it. They find context. And they transform training and instruction into learning.

Our imperative is to accept and embrace blended learning. We can even stop using the word blended just as we can stop using the letter e in e-learning. Great learn­ing is blended. And learning in the 2000s will always have an element of e.

We have to change much to move toward accepting and leveraging blended learning. The imperative must be embraced by:

• Instructional designers, who must expand their models and templates to include blended learning.

• Learning and training organizations, which must encourage blended learning through their marketing and charge-back models.

The Handbook of Blended Learning

• Technology and system suppliers, who must develop authoring tools, learn­ing systems, and content collections to allow blended learning in a rapid development era.

• Learners, who must continue to see blended learning as a natural aspect of what they do and not an extender of training time.

Blended learning is an imperative. It reflects the blended nature of our world, our workforce, and the natural process of how people really learn.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1985). Classroom conflict: Controversy versus debate in \ learning groups. American Educational Research Journal, 22(2), 237-256.

CHAPTER THREE