IS THERE A CASE FOR RE-PERSONALISING LEARNING IN A BLENDED COMMUNICATION SKILLS COURSE FOR PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS?

A key advantage of blended course design is the opportunity to provide participants with choices to personalise their learning, and facilitating student autonomy and self-regulated learning is an important consideration in the development of e-learning courses (Tallent-Runnels et al. et al., 2006: 116; Gulbahar and Madran, 2009: 4). The accommodation of learner choice was a key design goal of a multi-module communication skills course for pre-service teachers in Singapore.

In this course, the focus is on communication skills needed to function effectively in the school environment. While compulsory for all postgraduate diploma in education student teachers, the aim was to recognise that these were graduates who had some instruction in communication skills at the undergraduate level as well as varying degrees of work experience employing communication skills.

The course was run as a blended course for four years, offering a high degree of personal learning choices, until 2015, when it was redesigned as an all face-to-face class. The aim was to provide a common context for learning the communication skills and make the connection between modules more cohesive. This redesign presented an opportunity to compare student (and course tutor) responses to the blended and post-blended versions of the course year-on-year.

The presentation aims to:
1) describe the elements of the blended and post-blended course design,
2) highlight some of the key ways that the participants and tutors responded to the course in blended and all face-to-face mode, and
3) share ways that the lessons learnt from the first all face-to-face run led to course revisions for the following year.

The presentation is situated within the educational context of Singapore, but a similar course design with its role in enhancing learner choice through blended learning could equally be applied to other contexts in which course designers are considering how to provide personalized options for learning in their own blended courses.

References:
[1] Gülbahar Y and Madran RO (2009) Communication and collaboration, satisfaction, equity, and autonomy in blended learning environments: A case from Turkey. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 10(2): 1-22.
[2] Tallent-Runnels et al. MK, Thomas JA, Lan WY, Cooper S, Ahern TC, Shaw SM and Liu X (2006) Teaching courses online: A review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 76(1): 93-135.