Abstract:

Several European educational institutes have come together to explore the development of a workbook to help adult educators incorporate blended activities into their teaching process. To develop this workbook, representatives from each of the European institutes attended a two-day workshop where a range of critical thinking and problem-solving techniques were employed to develop the table of contents (and some preliminary content) of the workbook.

Four techniques were used for the workshop, with the first focusing on an overview of the topic of blended learning, the second concentrating on the details of that topic, the third was designed to bring the discussion back to a higher-level overview again, and the final one was to dive into the details and questions again. This pattern of OVERVIEW-DETAIL-OVERVIEW-DETAIL was designed to ensure that this topic was fully explored. For each of the techniques, the partners spent 30-45 minutes on that technique, followed by a 30-45 minute general discussion on the outcomes of the technique.

Triadic Elicitation Activity:
The first technique was based on triadic elicitation (a requirements gathering technique from knowledge management), where in this case three sets of three words were discussed, and for each set of words the discussion began with an exploration of which of two words had the most in common, and which was the odd one out. The three groups of three words were:
- “E-Learning”, “M-Learning”, “D-Learning”
- “Online learning”, “E-Assessment”, “Computer-Aided teaching”
- “Flipped classrooms”, “Virtual learning environment”, “Synchronous and asynchronous learning”.

The goal of this activity was introductory in nature, both to help the participants to get to know each other, and to ensure that all participants have a shared understanding of some key terms associated with blended learning.

Ishikawa Diagram Activity:
Ishikawa diagrams are used to explore an issue looking at the major causes, and root-causes. For this activity the major causes were labelled with the questions: “Why”, “How”, “Where”, “When”, “Who”, and “What”, and the issue in this case was stated as “What are the important things a novice should know about blended activities as they begin their journey to blending”.

PESTLE Analysis Activity:
Another activity undertaken with the participants was to do a PESTLE analysis. “PESTLE” is an initialism for analyzing a scenario using the following factors: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental. The topic that was discussed was “How can we ensure that blended learning is successfully adopted, and what are potential barriers?”.

MindMap Activity:
The final major activity that the participants engaged in was to develop a MindMap to describe some of the major content of the Blended Learning Workbook. The participants were instructed on how to create a MindMap and were given crayons and coloured markers to work on a MindMap in small groups focusing on four main concepts “Teaching”, “Technology”, “Evaluation” and “Management”. There were seven MindMaps produced.

This research was an exploratory qualitative study, where the focus was placed on the number of unique ideas that each technique generated using colour coding, and the results found were as follows: Triadic Elicitation (51), Ishikawa Diagram (34), PESTLE (13), and a MindMap Activity (26).

Keywords:

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Mind Maps, Exploratory Qualitative Study.