Abstract:

The rapid development of information and communications technology has brought many changes and influenced greatly the way we live, work, but particularly the way we acquire new knowledge. The increasing use of digital tools in education accelerated and significantly advanced the process of teaching and learning at all levels of study. Blended learning represents perhaps one of the most effective ways to reconcile the traditional, formal face-to-face model of education and modern, informal, multi-media type of education. Realizing the advantages of blended learning and becoming fully aware of the necessity of modernization and internationalization of their curricula, universities around the world have devoted considerable time to designing and developing courses in blended format via e-learning platforms (usually free e-learning solutions, such as Moodle). Thus created multimedia digital environment is, we believe, particularly suitable for teaching and learning foreign languages.

The Faculty of Philology embraced the concept of blended learning and introduced it at all levels of study by installing and customizing the Moodle learning management system. This open source platform is used by our faculty in order to make news and announcements available, upload study material, give assignments and tests to our students, as well as grade them. What we wanted to achieve throughout our blended type of courses is to give philology students autonomy in learning foreign languages, as they can adjust the content available via Moodle platform to the objectives they want to attain before completing their studies. Hence, we offer various contents, that we believe relevant, and provide the freedom of choice to our students to deal with the subject matter that is most appealing to them in the context of courses they are attending during a particular semester. Taking into account different needs of our students, we believe that we have created blended type of learning that will enable them to use the time they intended to devote to learning foreign languages in the most optimal way.

We will pay particular attention to the courses offered in blended format within our PhD study programme Language, Literature, Culture. Our intention is to analyze the way they were created and developed, study materials and topics offered as additional and optional, as well as to explain the process of students’ assessment. We will emphasize a number of advantages of blended learning within the university framework and offer some of the best practices for teaching in multimedia environment. Also, as we are now witnessing the emergence of digital (smart) classrooms in Serbia, and therefore the introduction of electronic boards and textbooks, we strive to train future teachers of foreign languages to use digital tools as much as possible in classrooms, by showing them, on the example of our blended type of courses, how exactly they can be applied in the process of teaching.

Keywords:

Blended learning, PhD level, Faculty of Philology, ICT, digital tools, face-to-face, multi-media, education, e-learning platforms, Moodle, foreign languages, autonomy, Language, Literature, Culture, best practices, digital (smart) classrooms, Serbia, electronic textbooks.