Why Design a Blended Course?

Why design a blended course? In other words, what are the advantages to having a mixture of online and face to face instruction?

 Institutional prerogatives aside—i.e., the need to deliver a course to geographically dispersed learners or the need to leverage instructional resources more efficiently—why would a teacher want to design a blended course? How can a blended course help students to better meet the learning objectives?

 My first instinct is to say that computers do some things better than people, and these are the things that we should seek to use in a blended course first: metrics, data, analytics. Computers are also better (read: faster) at grading objective responses. Multiple choice quizzes are obviously something it makes sense to deliver on a computer so that a teacher can expend her energy elsewhere.

 But what else can computers do better or more efficiently than a teacher? A quick brainstorm:

• Immediately connect students to resources. A teacher can suggest resources, but if a student is sitting at a computer, she can usually go get them right now.
• Facilitate group collaboration. It’s much easier for students to, say, write a group paper, or edit one another’s work in real time, when they can use tools such as Google docs.
• Provide a “safe space” for shy students to participate. Some people are uncomfortable speaking in front of a large group. Such students might actually prefer to participate in online discussions, in which they have time to gather and edit their thoughts before presenting them.
• Encourage students to gather and edit their thoughts before presenting them (see above). I often have students do a quick-write before engaging in class discussions. This might be something better done online before class even begins.
• Connect students to a larger learning community. Teachers can have students Skype with experts in the field, watch videos that other instructors have created, and even access the online course components of other professors. All of this is valuable because it shows students that the issues they’re discussing are live and active conversations.
• Make students a part of the scholarly community. The internet provides a democratic medium for people to participate in scholarship. If students can blog, create learning objects for others, and showcase their work, they can actually add their voices to the scholarly conversation in a way that would never have been possible pre-internet.

As I was browsing other student blogs for BlendKit2014, I also found this list of the benefits of using technology in your teaching, from David Soliday (EdTech at OWU), to be useful.

In general, I think that a great goal for blended course design is to stay away from using technology just for the sake of using it (which would be the higher ed equivalent of what corporate instructional designer Cammy Bean calls clicky-clicky bling-bling, but to stick to using technology only when it either 1) truly adds something to the instructional event that a teacher alone cannot or 2) frees up the teacher to focus on doing what she does that a computer cannot replicate.

So I'm interested in hearing what other teachers think about the advantages of using technology in your teaching. Does my list represent the advantages you perceive, or have I missed something? And are there any cool tools that have helped you teach something that F2F interaction alone could not? Please share in the comments!