Abstract:

Many institutions of higher education are currently looking for new approaches to optimize the teaching and learning experience for faculty and students. One area providing new motivators to strengthen student engagement in the learning process is the advances in learning technologies. Our university has embraced these advances in learning technologies to initiate its move from a traditional face-to-face teaching methodology to a blended teaching approach that will replace 20 % of all face-to-face instruction time with instruction and learning through an online environment. The paper explores the challenges and opportunities of blended learning course design and pedagogy and implementation of this new model at the University for instructional support staff, for curriculum design, for faculty and for students.
High-quality blended learning requires much more than converting portions of face-to-face instruction to instruction conducted in an online environment. As we experienced, this change in instructional pedagogy and delivery requires new kinds of interactions between students and faculty and students and faculty with the curriculum in online learning environment.

Even though the University had conditions suitable for blended course design, several improvements had to be adopted to maintain (and even improve) the integrity of the educational process for the institution, the faculty, and the student for the blended, online and face-to-face environment to be accepted as a viable educational delivery modality for teaching and learning. For example, as this paper will discuss, University’s instructional and curriculum team developed templates for creating a blended course depending upon the type of the class (lecture, practice / seminar, laboratory work) that was being redesigned for blended learning to address face-to-face and online components integration. In the redesign process, we had to determine how to measure seat time in the online component and align this time with total course credit hours. Through these efforts, there were developed guidelines for how to distribute instructional time, learning activities, and assessments between face-to-face and online components of the blended learning course.

The University’s steps toward blended learning has revealed challenges inherent in all institutions similar to the challenges for adopting blended learning elsewhere that this paper will address:
1. The necessity in centralized approaches to learning process planning and managing when replacing a part of face-to-face classes with online interactions.
2. The necessity to keep an appropriate balance between the amount of learning activities and assessments needed to provide evidence of learning and the risk of students’ overload.
3. The necessity to develop the standards for quantifying students and faculty workload in online environment in order to justify the total course credit hours.
4. The necessity to manage faculty workload in online environment which can be extremely high during the first stages of blended teaching implementation.
5. The necessity to change faculty opinion about e-learning, as most are resistant to online teaching.

This study will discuss the approaches and findings of University’s initial blended learning course offerings to address these challenges and the opportunities uncovered during the process that led us to develop a design model that could become a model other higher education institutions could adopt.

Keywords:

Blended learning, online learning, integration of face-to-face and online components, course redesign, online environment, instructional support.