BLENDED-LEARNING STRATEGIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

At a time when Personal Learning Environments are considered essential for a student centered learning approach, does it mean the end to the more “traditional LMS”? Where do social networks fit in? Can these be seen as parallel learning environments that complement the institutional LMS? Higher education institutions have to analyze possible ways of overcoming the difficulties they are facing. This paper presents a reflection on the importance of using web 2.0 technologies, personal learning environments (PLE) and learning management systems (LMS) in a higher education context. It describes today’s exploration by Portuguese universities and predicts future directions. Moreover, it presents a classification of the main concepts and free tools available on the Internet.
Using the MIPO model (Integration model by objectives), this paper also presents a new framework, designed to support decision making in the selection of a tool category to be used in a specific learning activity.
The classification and framework are explained using concrete examples in specific contexts. All results obtained are discussed in depth.
The work described has emerged as the result of a search for a solution to a perceived necessity in daily teaching and at the request of the post-graduation students of communication technologies b-learning course, at ISCAP. This course is attended, mainly, by teachers who have difficulties mapping the extensive number of web tools available to improve learning. These students tested and validated the classification presented in this paper.