Why every educator needs a blended-learning strategy and how to get started?

Omar Bellahsen
Sep 1, 2018 · 5 min read

Technology is affecting every educational experience regardless of educators’ involvement and approval. All learners will at some point try to get their questions answered online, find practice exercises or collaborate with their classmates. Many forward thinking educators have already adopted real strategies for education technology to serve their pedagogical goals and help their students. Meanwhile, others are leaving its use to be random, unsupervised and often counter-productive. Blended-learning is a concept that can help educators build a solid strategy to complement learners’ learning experience and have all their needs met.

Learners are already using digital

It has become first-instinct for most learners to google a concept they didn’t understand, post a question on forums such as Quora or collaborate on projects using social networks. While building their online autonomy is important and should be encouraged, the fact that most educators are completely absent from the online experience presents consequential shortfalls. First, the learner can always use some guidance and gain efficiency in the way he learns even online. Second, the teacher can move part of the pedagogical experience to the digital space in order to gain operational efficiency, increase engagement and make the precious face-to-face time more beneficial to his students. Finally and most importantly, the online interactions can be an invaluable source of data. It can allow to better understand student difficulties and be a resource for teachers to personalize their pedagogy to every learner.

Too much data is lost

I remember my first day in every single class I took in Business School: I would always get a Facebook invitation to join a group specific to that class. The interactions were very interesting, the collaboration was easier and more importantly, there was so much data for the teacher and the administrators to inform key decision making, improve the learning experience and adapt the courses. However, the professors and administration had no access to those facebook groups.

One simple but important first step could be for the teachers to systematically ask their students to add them to the Facebook group or whatever platform they use. Even better, the educators can take the matters in their own hands and create those virtual spaces and manage them. There are even educational solutions that have built-in dashboards and management tools for educators to easily leverage the digital spaces. But more than using tools arbitrarily, educators need to truly rethink their pedagogical strategy to include and interact with the online activity. Thus, the important of Blended-Learning

What is Blended-Learning?

Blended-Learning is an educational setup that combines both physical classroom learning and online learning. Most importantly Blended-Learning consists in articulating them so that they constantly feed from each other. Depending on the proportion and function fulfilled by the online experience compared to the brick-and-mortar classroom experience, the Clay Christensen Institute has put together 7 Blended-Learning Models that can be implemented as-is or serve as inspiration for educators to establish an elaborate digital strategy. Let us focus on one of the most prominent: the flipped classroom.

The Flipped Classroom Model

I chose to focus here on the flipped classroom model that caught a great deal of attention over the past years. I think it is one of the most extreme blended-learning models. I acknowledge it might not suit every single educator, but it can create tremendous value in many cases.

While in a traditional setup the learning materials are delivered in the brick-and-mortar classroom, the delivery process happens mostly through online resources in a flipped classroom. Conversely, the traditional “homework” gets done in the physical classroom under the supervision of the teacher. This is beneficial on many levels:

  • The teacher gets to automate the repetitive tasks related to his job. He can record himself or use off-the-shelf resources instead of delivering the same lecture over and over again. He can now focus on key personalized interventions to help students deal with their problems by interacting with them individually in theclass.
  • Students can explore the resources at the pace that suits them best. It may be tricky to make sure they go through the materials. But this is also a way to push them to become autonomous learners and insure they take responsibility over their education.
  • The online resources can consist in recorded lectures, quizzes, online discussions and many creative activities the educators can build. This diversity and freedom can be a true leverage to allow learners to practice more and get a deeper grasp of the subjects at hand.

How to get started?

Let me reemphasize this: there is no perfect blended-learning model. Every educator must develop his own vision of what pedagogy he wants to deploy. Setting clear goals helps speed up the process and knowing about few major models will only serve as a source for inspiration.

Once the goals are clearly set, comes the messy part; choosing the technology to support the pedagogy. Just google a few EdTech key words to witness the impressive amount of solutions available. One needs to surely keep up to date on major trends to avoid confusion. But one will quickly realize that most apps, do not give educators the possibility to supervise learners’ activity. I believe educators should make that a criteria in their search for EdTech solutions in order to leverage the collected data, provide feedback and optimize the learning. Also, educators need to be able to earn more money proportionately to the effort they put in. The value created for learners needs to be captured at some point especially that the time investment is in most cases increased.

How Squidora can help

At squidora we have built the ultimate platform to do just that. We put educators at the center of the experience. We provide them with the tools they need to deploy customizable online learning activities that complement the face-to-face experience. We ensure the privacy of learners data and provide a dashboard view for educators to track improvement and coach learners. Furthermore, we value the effort exalted by every professional trainer, coach or teacher. That is why we provide them with monetization tools to increase their income and value their work.

Interested in adopting this new innovative approach to education technology? Get started on: squidora.com

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