Blended Learning: An Encompassing Overview

Blended Learning has become a dominant expression associated with modern E-Learning methods, these days. The eloquence of terming the method as Blended Learning rests on the notion of a combined methodology that consists of both traditional classroom techniques and the independent modes of self-learning. The specialty of this blended method lies in its creativity and hybridism transcending the rigid margins of structured learning.

Blended Learning firmly projects the ideas beyond meager installations of computers or other technological devices in the classroom; it further accentuates some fundamental changes in the ways teachers and students draw near the experiences of learning. The trend of Blended learning is also phrased as Hybrid/ Mixed/ Integrated Learning. It is considered that the newer appropriations of Education as a system has given birth to such practices like this.

E-Learning Procedures

Processes like Blended Learning acts as a mirror to the idea of education ahead of transferring facts from memories to pen-paper. It is evident that the post-2000 revamp in the sphere of technology has rejuvenated the E-Learning procedures; it has, after two more decades, become a new challenge to impregnate mechanical reproduction with more emphasized creativity within the bubble of teaching and learning.

Educational experts appreciate the method of Blended Learning based on a very lateral rationale.

It is a multichannel teaching method that crafts the marriage between the most unique phenomena of a classroom and the high-tech online learning- both in one space.

The most recent innovations of this scheme of learning are leaned upon the augmentation of technological advancements. Internet connectivity and computers have become very significant tools to undergo the Blended Learning method and have inaugurated a new world of online learning.        

---

What is blended learning?

Blended learning can be defined as a formal program of education that is built upon the organic interpersonal classroom communication on one hand. It also boasts all sorts of individual undertakings of learning via several online media. Blended Learning is multi-lateral in nature that always leads to tutor-centric activities, illustrations, audio-visual presentations, digital assignments, and discussions in person.

It is really interesting to understand what implies a Blended Learning. Any course that adopts this model, can be conducted in a genuine brick and wood classroom with a devoted teacher, but it additionally offers upgraded learning prospects via Digital Platform. Online education is at its peak during the pandemic. The statistical figure of Institutional Digital Learning is growing each year.

According to a survey by the Babson Survey Research Group, the proportion of students taking at least one online course has increased by 32%, which is all time amplification. Moreover, contemporary data from a think-tank agency applied to education, The Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation anticipated that within 2019, every institution will run half of its total number of courses through the virtual medium.

These two empirical studies have advanced a lot of educational institutions to take over blended learning methods more solemnly than ever before. Therefore, Blended Learning can be simply defined as the blending of face-to-face and online learning. Both these processes actually contribute to the learning process in a complimentary manner where the strength of each is utilized at its best for the most improvised occurrence of learning.  

---

How does blended learning work?

Usually, Blended Learning is organized by several Institutions by connecting students with the teacher/instructor through a web conference and thus a digital classroom is created. One must remember that such technologies are nowhere monotonous and homogeneous in nature. Rather, they are mostly ranged from diverse sources of online connectivity.

Mostly, the institutions are observed to scrounge the largest popular technology to carry out the University level online courses. This is the factor for which Blended Learning works very significantly across the Montessori and 12^th level learning programs. No other method has made the process of learning so personal and internalized than this scheme.

Furthermore, this process keeps a very keen focus on the standard of system management quality and the scale of the user-friendly quotient of the E-Learning activity.

The multiplicity of standard as mentioned above includes interoperability standards, for example,

• the SIF specification from A4L or the Learning Tools Interoperability specification from IMS Global Consortium or
• academic standards like state standards and Common Core State Standards.

Blended Learning Method Creates a Federation

These parameters of a standard of management promote the integration of technology into a diversity of subject matters. Therefore, we can easily consider that the Blended Learning method creates a federation of a system of learning which supports the development of an enhanced experience within an online community. It is because of the fact that deliberations are always finer aids for students. Thus, this virtual learning atmosphere assists to build a smoother connection between the professors and the students devoid of any mandate of physical appearance.

Hence, this method has become more and more indispensable in a pandemic ridden world of education. Therefore, it is said that Blended Learning has given us a thoughtful design of a ‘virtual cafe’. Many schools, as a result, are using the online tool for the online classes, classroom assignments, creating better opportunities for the question and answer including various other administrations related tasks. Thus, Blended learning manufactures the most affirmative and productive outcomes of the virtual community.

---

Why is blended learning so effective?

The effectiveness of Blended Learning has been comprehended by a healthy chunk of academic experts. It is endorsed as a spot on intervention on the old school techniques of unilateral methods of learning.  As Blended Learning always pushes the essence of online learning, computer and internet-based performances have grasped the substratum of academic excellence at a large scale.

Henceforth, this method offers a profusion of training; it carries within itself the in-built self-evaluation tools and revised resources on the stipulation. Many students have asserted that they are experiencing a better learning familiarity as the Blended Learning method is supporting them with the use of vibrant presentational and online learning tools like mentioned above. 

Self Augmented Modes of Study

Another efficacy of Blended learning lies in the provision that it allocates students to self augmented modes of study. This concept of empowering learners in an educational process is revolutionary. We know that traditionally most of the methods of learning have been organized within the walls of the classroom. 

It was during the late nineteenth century that the perception of Gurukul was popularized where learners’ experiences were integrally attached to their interaction with nature.

However, time has changed since then. The lives of new-age students have loads of sources at their accessibility even in the outer surface of the classroom, that it easier for them to strike into these techniques. Besides, the E-learning software makes it feasible for the students to become more and more self-sufficient and decisive over most of their own choices of learning procedures.

---

Blended Learning: Types and Examples

The firm rejuvenating approach developed by the arena of school education has given rise to the tendency of personalized learning. Most of the schools are always trying to figure out different ways of revamping this self-sufficient learning process without expanding their budget. Therefore, Blended Learning has become one of their primary choices.

The unique combination of face-to-face instructions with online learning has manufactured very positive results as considered by the strategy based researches funded by education managers. In fact, a 2010 study sponsored by the Department of Education, United States of America, showed that blended learning evidently gives improved outcomes from the learners than any other technique adopted as a face-to-face, non-hybrid method of communicative learning.

Experts think that this rapidly growing learning model not only amplifies the litheness and individualization of learners but also encourages the instructors to inflate the occasion of teaching sessions. Thus, to understand the core quintessence of Blended Learning, we should go through the following types of Blended Learning techniques along with suitable examples.

These above types being the sole categories of Blended Learning models, other important types along with suitable explanation will be coming soon as we move forward with the piece.

Station Rotation Blended Learning

A classroom generally consists of widely scattered ability echelons. The same lesson can never be planned with any typical deliverance mode. Time also differs in each case. We can observe some students excelling with vowels and consonants at Grade I level while a chunk of the same class is still working on their letter identification practices.  

The same goes for mathematics classes. Many of the students are already keen on summation using the number line and the teachers no more remain in a need to sit with them for a twenty minutes long session for it. This is the situation where the Station Rotation technique works the best in the surrounding of a Blended Learning schema. It is the best way of accommodating the largest possible number of students in a single classroom in a just and orderly manner.

As the words sound, Station Rotation is exactly an arrangement where the students spin through several stations while they are experiencing every single subject session.

It is an alternative to teaching one lesson to a smaller number of students at a time. Smaller and customized groups are made among the students taking into consideration all the intake ability parameters of the students in a classroom. Each delivery of the same lesson differs from the custom or category of the cluster. The learning strength of every cluster is separately taken care of by the teachers in this mode of Blended Learning.

Role of Station Rotation

It is commonly observed by the teachers, as they express to the analysts that it turns out to be very important for a teacher to cope up with the difference of merit and ability within a classroom. It is the most difficult challenge they face, as reported. The Station Rotation method enables the teachers to provide additional support to the differently fragile section of the class; simultaneously they need to keep the advanced section active within the field of learning the same lesson. Here are the credibility and defensive role of the Station Rotation style of Blended Learning.

Professional instructors further split the Station Rotation method into three models. It is the best approach to integrate technology with the learning process. Caitlin Tucker, a former teacher, and a well-reached blogger shares her experience in this context. She entails how three models of the Station Rotation technique set aside students through different crooks of a classroom. Each student gathers knowledge by stepping into teacher-led stations, online stations, and offline stations.     

Tucker also alerts the instructors who always are inclined to slip into a furrow of devising a station. Thus, she categorizes the ordinary drawbacks and likely explanations to those. 

Lab Rotation Blended Learning

In a Lab Rotation model of Blended Learning, the students are rotated between a classroom and a laboratory. It is such a scheme that contained by a specified itinerary or topic, students swivel at flat points in an instance (on a fixed timetable or at the teacher’s prudence) flanked by a classroom and a computer laboratory. In this way, the students get training mostly online. The classroom is usually held in reserve for additional learning actions. Therefore, we can say that the Lab Rotation model of Blended Learning proposes made to order training promise that lets the students become accustomed to their basic requirements.

Remote Blended Learning

Remote blended learning, also known as enhanced implicit blended learning, and is the ideal resolution for many learners. A few learners are excessively demanding to focus on the class frequently. They need the elasticity of online sessions; however, they still need the infrequent face-to-face class with the tutor. This is where isolated intermingled learning comes in.

On average, for a learner taking a track modeled on the remote blended learning perception, the learner does the largest part of the studying virtually and usually at residence. The learning activities may encompass reading, research works, and competent tasks, listening to podcasts, and keeping track of the videos. Most of the activities are not synchronous, though necessitated activities may be built-in. The bulk of learning time takes place outer of the classroom and on the learner’s point in time.

However, there are times when learners want to convene with the tutor. Conceivably the class calls for in-person lab work or the mentor wants each one to congregate for miniature cluster discussions. But remote blended learning conferences do not meet over and over again. So when they do, instructors have to employ the time successfully. One fixation to keep in wits when on earth any class is virtual, the class is regarding learning.

It is not about the newest applications or online apparatus, except the definite way is about ascertaining and utilizing new mechanisms for a precise principle. However, usually, new digital apps are used to prop up education and not take the position of it. Therefore, instructors and instructional marketers must use any online gears deliberately to meet the learning product and purpose.

Flex Blended Learning

The term ‘Flex’ is incorporated in categories of Blended Learning and its mold is that in an itinerary or topic in which online learning is the vertebrae of scholar learning, even if it expresses students to offline bustles at times. Students shift on an independently tailored, liquid schedule in the middle of learning modalities. The teacher of evidence is on-site, and students learn typically on the brick-and-mortar college grounds, apart from for any groundwork assignments. The teacher of documentation or extra adults provides face-to-face sustenance on a supple and adaptive as per the need foundation during activities such as small-sect lessons, assembly projects, and personage tutoring.

This model has got some sort of similarities with the Remote blended learning, Inside-Out Blended Learning, etc. but yet it upholds its own perfection in the case of higher education. This method is chiefly characterized by its resourcefulness to convene the requirements of an assortment of official and informal learning progressions in schools, organizations, homeschooling, and all other forms of educational activities.

‘Flipped Classroom’ Blended Learning

Flipping the classroom engrosses providing instruction oriented resources for the learners to use faint of class so that class time is not tied up for further instructional activities. The Flipped Classroom Model is explained and defended by the educational expert Martin Mull.

While not all of the morality, Mull describes that some of the learning principles are utilized by all teachers who spin their classroom, all implications embrace the scheme that, “Students get ready for class by inspecting visuals, listening to podcasts, appraising article, or reflecting questions that work as a way in their preceding knowledge.

Milman, another expert of the field explains that the design is that somewhat than taking up costly class time for a teacher to bring in a notion often via series of lectures, the instructor can produce a video sermon, screencast, or vodcast that instructs students the impression, freeing up priceless class time for more attractive and often joint activities typically assisted by the instructor.

Milman goes on to note down that seminal and combined judgment should be incorporated as well as consequential face-to-face wisdom exchanges. Proponents of a Flipped Classroom afford many arguments for appealing students in the substance outside of the class to get time within the class for supplementary instructional activities.

Milman also identifies what could be measured as the key benefit. He gradually noticed that amplified class time for added engaging tuition becomes the sole achievement of this method. Millard describes advantages such as enlarged student rendezvous, growth of team-based dexterity, personalized student assistance, focused classroom dialogue, and imaginative free will of talent while maintaining a standardized program.

Individual Rotation Blended Learning

The Individual Rotation model is more suitable for students aspiring to higher educational degrees. The designers of the model recognize the dominant goals of new-age students who mostly desire to continue studies simultaneously with some sort of professional engagements. Keeping this basic tendency in mind, the Individual rotation model of Blended Learning facilitates the learners to rotate from beginning to end stations, but on personal choice based schedules located by a teacher or even by a proper designing of a software algorithm.

Contrasting with other alternation models, students do not unavoidably rotate to each station; they rotate merely to the activities scheduled on their playlists. This model is usually considered as similar to the Mastery-Based Blended learning technique. The basic character of the model is that it is the personalization of student learning as unwavering by individual schedules that have the probability of a healthier meeting of the needs of each student.

Project-Based Blended Learning

Project-Based Blended Learning is an instructional method that is very encouraging for the students to learn by applying acquaintance and skills all the way through an engaging understanding. It presents opportunities for deeper learning in context and for the expansion of vital skills tied to college and career eagerness. The characteristics of Project-Based Blended

Learning can be marked in three parts of meaningful project-based learning activities.

1. Firstly, it is Interdisciplinary where the curriculum is designed to slot in students using practical problems. Because real-world challenges are hardly ever solved using in sequence or skills from a solitary subject locale. Projects necessitate students to appoint in inquiry, resolution building, and product edifice to help tackle the issue or defy presented. As students do the vocation, they over and over again use substantive knowledge and skills from several academic domains to effectively include the project.
2. Secondly, this mode is Rigorous in the sense of constructing the psyche of a learner as much knowledge and skill-based as possible. It always acts beyond the practice of mere recalling or recognizing. It also encourages interrogative influence within a student. Thus, inquiry leads the student to imagine critically as they are using their scholastic awareness in real-world submissions.
3. Finally, the mode of learning champions in its quality of endorsing Student-centered knowledge sharing. Here, the roles of the teacher budge from content-deliverer to launchpad/project manager. Students work more autonomously through the PBBL (Project-Based Blended Learning) process, with the teacher providing shore up only when needed. Students are encouraged to formulate their individual decisions about how unsurpassed to do their work and lay bare their understanding.

Self-Directed Blended Learning

Self Directed Blended Learning (BL) creates a ‘rich’ didactic milieu with several technology-enabled announcement forms in cooperation with face-to-face and online teaching. Students’ characteristics are strictly related to the learning usefulness for this method. Students’ capability to express themselves in culture and to utilize learning technologies can influence student learning success. This study examined the collision of self-directed learning, technology readiness, and learning inspiration on the three existences viz. social, teaching, and cognitive among the students.

The results pointed to that the self-directed environment provides good quality facilitation for students’ community contribution in the class. Student technology keenness plays a stronger function in impacting the coaching procedure.

Inside-Out Blended Learning

The objective of the reproduction of Blended Learning. This model is simple as much as necessary–not uncontaminated educational ability, but in its place, genuine self-knowledge, miscellaneous local and global interdependence, adaptive grave thinking, and adaptive media literacy. By intend this model give emphasis to the function of play, assorted digital and physical media, and a designed interdependence stuck between communities and schools.

The attempted individualization of learning occurs from first to last new actuators and new planning of local and global citizenship. An Inside-Out School returns the student learning, and answerability away from university circles and back to the community. No longer do schools edify. Rather, they proceed as curators of capital and learning tools and support the swing of the burden of learning reverse to a more balanced standpoint of stakeholders and contributors.

Outside-In Blended Learning

It is a procedure that is an exact reverse of the inside-out Blended Learning. In this method, the learning process begins outside the class. Usually, it is initiated by involving students in practical field experiences. They are often trained to understand the nature of the outer world around the classroom. The main goal becomes amplifying the skill of a learner to efficiently relate the occurrences outside the classroom to those happening inside. Therefore, after beginning the sharing of knowledge in outer space, the Outside-in method finally gets the student back to his/her classroom. The inquiries generated from the intakes in the fieldwork translate the students’ quality of building up arguments inside the walls of a classroom.

Supplemental Blended Learning

Supplemental learning is raising in reputation crossways the US. Due above all too increased classroom sizes and decreased budgets, established education unaccompanied is becoming less passable mainly for children with particular needs. Today’s classroom teachers basically are forced to effort with students who own a wide display of special needs in the identical classroom filled with too many children. This problem is usually addressed by a supplemental way of Blended Learning.

With the fast-growing lives and intensive use of chemicals and other mechanical lifestyle aid, has given birth to a mounted figure of special children. To keep pace with such a change, there is no other suitable alternative than this method. It gives the best effort to sustain an inclusive approach to child education. The main benefits achieved by this method are Individual Attention, Subject Matter Reinforcement, Homework Help, Study Habits, Confidence Building through Special Education Tutoring, Tackle Insecurity, etc.

Mastery-Based Blended Learning

A vital element of blended learning is the mastery-based sequence: enabling students to budge promote in their learning at their own swiftness as they master content relatively than based on conventional time configuration.

As more and more educators athwart the country are poignant towards blended learning, they are stressed with a very challenging question: how precisely do I make mastery-based series go off in my classroom? It’s very difficult. I have been working on this precise issue for the last few years and have learned a bunch that I hope could help educators come to a decision whether they are all set to try it and how to truly make it come about.

---

Benefits of Blended Learning

Blended online learning is an up-and-coming discrepancy in the learning process. Whereas blended learning develops face-to-face classroom training by toting up asynchronous online tuition via a learning administration system, blended online learning introduces synchronous online learning by the use of web conferencing to boost or else asynchronous online course. This particular system of learning can potentially draw seasoned knack to online instruction since the similarities of web conferencing to time-honored face-to-face teaching.

Adding synchronous sessions can also add to learners’ intellectual shape about the people in online courses. However, blended online learning can be carped as rejecting the “my time, my place” expediency that has drawn many learners to online education. It also requires apposite software, guidance, and technological hold-up. The defy in developing blended online learning courses is to determine an amalgamation of synchronous and asynchronous actions. This further empowers the technology affordances of each manner which are within the capabilities of instructors.

A small number of universities, especially the University of Central Florida and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, have purposefully developed blended learning as a technique to raise enrollments by sinking the number of on-campus meetings and in so doing making it reasonable for more learners to take college classes. More frequently, however, blended learning has been assumed without an organizational track by personage instructors who try to find benefits of capabilities of the educational management system to share out itinerary materials, administer grading and assignments, and demeanor asynchronous discussions.

While a great deal of the investigations on conversation boards is in the circumstance of asynchronous online courses, the identical benefits may be appropriate in blended learning looms in which learners in on-campus courses are assigned to partake in asynchronous online discussions flanked by face to face classes.

Benefits for Learners

As humankind goes digital, the E-Learning piece too has grown to clinch online tools to construct learning extra engaging, applicable, background, and immersive. The World Wide Web has made the prosperity of the chain accessible at our fingertips. No longer are learners constrained to a uni-dimensional familiarity of learning with a gush of information from the coach to the qualified.

Learners, today, are more responsive, more challenging, and less horizontal to acknowledge anything at countenance worth. On the turn over the side, the mind span of the digital age bracket is disappearing. With smartphones in their hands, these learners want in sequence somewhere, anytime, and with just a few clicks of the switch. Affluent media formats such as video/audio files Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality are now being used to grasp the learner’s thought width and make learning more appealing and efficient.

This being said, skill advancements cannot put back human communication. Learners require essential supervision and intelligence of background and course to understand online lessons, which only a personal coach can offer. While it is high-quality to have the right of entry to learning structure on the shift, instructor-led lineup learning in the boundaries of a physical classroom is vital to assemble far removed from skill sets and make certain team learning for most favorable results.

Cross Model

The rapidly changing landscape simply means that education and training practices should incorporate the best of both the worlds – the virtues of traditional classroom settings and the advantages of the online world.

This has given rise to the idea of blended learning, which is a cross model that includes online and customary learning methods. This kind of learning incorporates both the human component and the rich exercise of eLearning capital. Blended learning guarantees that the learners can drive their own learning experience through engaging, related and relevant learning resources offered online. Besides, it also incorporates the function of a coach for human communication, suggests, panel learning, etc.

Blended Learning prepares learners for the opportunity to come ahead of life. It offers revenue to put up expertise for real-world scenery, such as research dexterity, self-learning, self-engagement, assist to build up a ‘self-driving force’, superior decision making, healthier sense of accountability, computer literacy, etc.  It is evidently registered by the experts that Blended Learning results in Individual self-paced learning, More engaged students, Better information and feedback on work, Team learning and teaching, Extended time with students, Meaningful professional development, and so on.

Organizations are more and more realizing that blended learning, that is, a merge of mutually incorporated traditional and online learning, is the finest approach ahead. While online learning provides learners the occasion to learn at their personal rapidity, anytime, anywhere, and also sharpen their skills all the way through reproduction and ramification; coaching and mentorship programs in customary classroom settings afford the much-needed individual interface and more opening for communication and dreaming up with both adviser and peers when working towards a widespread purpose.

Benefits for Organizations

The gung ho world demands that organizations appear for pioneering ways to develop their competitive advantages at the side of reducing costs. To make certain that the right people have the exact skills and awareness to meet organizational goals, an organization must slip in standard training programs for their employees.

Offering simple, non-interactive online or face-to-face training sessions are not as much as necessary. Each methodology has its pros and cons with considerations to costs, time, knowledge, etc. Blended learning is where a learning agenda has more than one style of delivering instructions. A perfect blended learning program has web-based training with a reasonable quantity of human touch and media.

Blended learning profits both the learner and the Company. If an organization is skeptical about moving its training requirements to web-based e-learning modules, blended learning consents to for this soft conversion. A step-by-step program, whereby the group can budge learners from classroom training to online learning is easier to get used to.

These programs are relying on a variety of factors such as the content nature, spectators, learner’s needs, ambitions of the organization, etc. To generate a blended learning loom, organizations should spot the content for online and in-person preparation and timings for practical and in-person sessions.

---

Blended Learning Pitfalls

A large amount of regularly, blended learning portrays a learning understanding that can be adapted in the direction of specific addressees, and which is not forced by legroom or instance. With this in the psyche, a broader designation could be subsequent that the learning in which the audience becomes skilled, at least, part of the time in standard enlightening freedom and the other component of the time with the aid of an online atmosphere, controlling their individual time, position, alleyway, and/or tempo.

At Obsidian Learning, we suppose that learning should be continuing, happen when needed, and build the use of low-priced technologies. We use a solitary, research-based replica of blended learning to increase affluent instructional environments that bundle a big bang for the dough. Something we can all be in agreement on is that blended learning in one appearance or another should be part of today’s commercial learning legroom. Many companies are present on the cusp of developing blended learning programs.

The method tries to Fit Existing Courses into a Blended Delivery

Any blended learning program similar to any learning program should be intended from the score. Below given are the focal points to consider for building up a successful Blended Learning curriculum-

• recognizing the desired outcomes,
• taking a look at the audience,
• reviewing the substance, and
• determining the best approach

One should not skip any of these steps, because what capacity an excellent face-to-face lecture has, will not necessarily always translate to equally efficient online training.

Selecting the Wrong Technology

Technology is, of course, a prerequisite for the fundamental aspect of the blended program. However, the program devises, audience, and content should notify the choice of the machinery. One has to risk constraining the design by being protected into a convinced technology even if it is not the greatest suited for the goal. There is copiousness of choices out there; in a list of pinnacle eLearning authoring apparatus, they’ve only directed to peel it down to just over 100 potentials.

Assuming that Everything can be Taught Through a Blended Approach

Blended learning is doubtlessly a prevailing and effective plan. But, as with nearly all things in life, self-control is the key. There may be a department where everything can well fit into a blended learning program, but more than expected, there will be topics that should be trained the only face to face, or content that should almost certainly be designed as concerting support rather than a full-blown itinerary.

---

Frequently Asked Questions

Latest Posts

• Get information about the Office 365 Windows 10 activator before it's too late
• Microsoft Office 2024 Activator Download
• Computational Intelligence- A Powerful Tool for Digital Transformation By Prof. Brahmjit Singh
• Ensuring Data Security in eLearning App Development: A Comprehensive Guide
• What’s The Required PTE Score For An Australian Student Visa?