How much blended learning?

The short answer is I don’t know.

The long answer needs to start by defining blended learning and by asking whether it is possible to find out the rate of take-up of blended learning in British HE.

I am fortunate to have just completed a course on blended learning offered by Powerful Learning Practice and it became clear to me that my former understanding of blended learning as traditional face to face learning supplemented by some off the premises digital work wouldn’t do. It became obvious that blended learning is not just about the ratio of digital to face to face but also encompasses a very different pedagogy. You can’t bolt on a bit of blended learning and carry on as before.

In retrospect this was obvious, as teachers that I met in online training who introduced digital elements to their practice often found that they had to change their pedagogy as well as their tools. For many this was an uncomfortable process because it usually entailed losing control over what students are doing during their blended bit. Seen from another perspective, it was the first step in enabling self-directed learning though often, neither the teacher nor the learners are aware of this.

So in the end, it makes sense that the definition of blended learning that I came to, put the pedagogy of self-directed learning to the fore with the digital aspects included as enablers rather than the cause or main purpose of blended learning. So blended learning is

On the one hand, teachers tend to find the loss of control worrying, so this may be one reason for the low take-up, but on the other, this emphasis on facilitating self-directed learners would seem to be an excellent fit for higher education. However if you look for definitions of blended learning you will find that many focus on the tech aspect and if they mention pedagogy it will be to argue for the relative merits of Station Rotation, Lab Rotation, Flex and Flipped Learning.

It is only when you put self-directed learning first in the form of more student voice and choice that the newly published list of blended learning competences by NACOL make sense. When you look through the competences you will see that it is about much more than technical prowess. Note also that this is addressed to school teachers rather than university lecturers.

So much for what blended learning means. Let’s move on to the supposed low take-up of blended learning in UK universities.

Once again I think there are opposing forces at work here, as well as a need to define our terms.

The question asked about blended learning but someone else with a similar question might have asked about the prevalence of Flipped Learning or Flexible Learning even though these are not the same. I am not sure whether statistics are collected on this topic though clearly HE in the UK is aware enough of the possibilities to have JISC produce various blended learning guides and case studies. So I am not sure that we can get an objective view on this. Certainly a quick search leads to articles like this but their choices don’t seem to be based on any objective criteria and it irritates me slightly that they don’t mention the Open University which has to be the first and best blended learning institution in the UK!

So assuming that there is low adoption of blended learning approaches, why might that be?

I attended a University Business Forum recently in Vienna and learned there that the typical HE student is not who you think it is. The stereotype late teen residential student is now in a minority, at least in the US and the trends are going the same way in Europe. This means that the ‘typical’ university student is very different to only a few years ago. These new university students are older and with responsibilities such as jobs and children which mean that they are looking for more flexible avenues into higher education. Therefore there should be a push towards blended learning from these new customers.

The article I referenced earlier seems to view online and face to face as very separate customer groups and whereas I have now accepted that blended can mean 100% online, perhaps the universities are missing a trick in seeing the two types of student as so distinct.

I am guessing that most universities now have some sort of digital learning department, such as this one in Glasgow. However I am well aware that the existence of such departments is no guarantee of either take-up or quality take-up. Most departments seem to target the willing first and this leads to rather bizarre situations in which you know that the digital learning department is doing great work but you also know that there are still lecturers who have to have an assistant to advance their (boring and badly designed) PowerPoint slides (naming no names!).

I don’t think that it is any surprise that the most innovative pedagogy is seen in schools rather than universities where the staff are not 100% dedicated to teaching. And let’s not forget that most university staff are not trained in pedagogical techniques so it should be no surprise that if classroom teaching is a challenge then adding digital tools to the mix may be even more of a challenge and perhaps a challenge too far.

Another message I got loud and clear from the University Business Forum was the difference between North and South in Europe with northern countries more able to experiment and the southern countries more hidebound by rules and regulations. If this is true then you would expect to see a great deal of experimentation and innovation in the UK. And indeed there are first class innovators such as Diana Laurillard who is running a Blended Learning MOOC at Future Learn and Grainne Conole who has done wonderful work on (digital) learning design and not forgetting the Open University which I mentioned above. But experimentation needs to be accepted all the way up to the top and beyond if it is to be accepted as part of an officially accredited degree. I am thinking here of implementing authentic and design-based learning which is still all too uncommon.

I don’t think that I have been able to prove or disprove the assumptions in the original question. I do think though that there are good reasons to expect blended learning in HE in the UK to be patchy and only good in places. I guess we are in a transition period. Transition from old to young, from not pedagogically trained to pedagogically trained, from traditional lecture-based courses to more practical, authentic project-based approaches and transition from the stereotype residential student to the flexible student.

Thanks for an interesting question!