The Secret to Better Blended Learning and 2 Tips to Achieving It

According to John Daniel’s keynote at the annual NUTN conference, today’s MOOCs are past their sell-by date.

However, Daniel, an international education and blended learning expert, says that MOOCs are a significant puzzle piece to the role that blended learning plays in teaching and learning in higher education.

That role is the secret to creating better blended learning for instructors and students alike: creating optimum synergy between in-person teaching sessions and learning online.

Daniel’s keynote addressed two key ways colleges can harness this educational synergy, and gain optimal benefits from blended learning:

1) Consider the research

Before launching into a new blended learning strategy, Daniel recommends diving into research on past effects of blended learning in higher education.

For his keynote, he pulled from blended learning researchers Bob Bernard and Barbara, pointing out the significant impacts of blended learning from their findings.

“They found that students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction,” Daniel says. “The advantage over face-to-face classes was significant in those studies contrasting blended learning with traditional face-to-face instruction, but not in those studies contrasting purely online with face-to-face conditions.”

Daniel also said these findings indicated that colleges should support redesigning their current educational instruction to create online learning opportunities in tandem with in-person teaching.

By digging into past research, colleges are able to borrow and apply ideas about blended learning that will benefit their own pedagogy. It will help these colleges better grasp where they currently stand with blended learning, and what they need to do improve their strategies.