Blended learning, a principle that has been around longer than e-learning or the Internet, has a simple definition of employing multiple approaches when teaching or learning. Yet with the advent of the Learning Management Systems (LMS), in practice many institutions have adopted the term to imply a combination of face-to-face activities and structured activities within an LMS environment.
As George Siemens argues:
Learning Management Systems (LMS) are often viewed as being the starting point (or critical component) of any elearning or blended learning program. This perspective is valid from a management and control standpoint, but antithetical to the way in which most people learn today.
With this understanding many educators on the frontier of online learning are experimenting with the use of more learner-centred tools such as blogs, wikis and news aggregators together with activities focusing on the active construction of the learner’s knowledge – empowering the learner. Yet these new tools can seem inaccessible to many facilitators and learners due simply to the different nature of the tools and a lack of established ideas for using them within learning activities. Even worse, facilitators can venture to try blogging in class but be turned off because of a negative experience (low student involvement). Even those of us who are familiar with the tools often struggle to use them in ways that engage our learners in the active construction of learning (well, I do anyway!).
Wouldn’t it be great to provide a dynamic resource for facilitators who are used to centralised information sources to ease their transition towards the distribution of free tools available now and in the future?
The idea:
To set up an infrastructure for a collaboratively-built online resource called “A guide to Blended Learning in the Knowledge Era.” (ideas for better names!?) This resource will be aimed at providing an easy transition for facilitators who might be wary of using the new tools (such as blogs, wikis and news aggregators), enabling them to have fun learning the new tools themselves while also suggesting lots of fun ideas for using the tools with their students. As facilitators become more confident using the distributed tools currently available they will hopefully become less dependent on this centralised resource (having established their own distributed feeds for learning). Yet at the same time these facilitators will be in a position to contribute back to the resource for those yet to make the transition - updating it with the new tools and strategies that they have gone on to discover!

With the fast-changing landscape of available tools this resource will only be worthwhile if it is able to keep pace with the changes - and this itself will only be possible if it is developed collaboratively from a wealth of experience larger than any one organisation can provide. Furthermore, for educators throughout the industry to see it as worthwhile to contribute some time and effort to such a free resource, I think the material contributed would have to be published under a Free For Education or Creative Commons license so that contributors can be certain that they will always have access to the resource that they helped to build.
The underlying technology…
The technologies that this resource could be based on include open-source Content Management Systems such as Drupal, Mambo or CivicSpace that all allow a wealth of online contributors to create the resource collaboratively. There are other Wiki tools that I’d like to check out, such as Wikipedia’s MediaWiki, but we need to evaluate which CMS is best suited to the task (for example, I think it needs to be easy to update without using special Wiki tags). I noticed that Drupal has a module for collaborative book or documentation writing and looks impressive all-round, so I might install it soon and check it out first.
Aims/Outcomes (incomplete)
My main outcome would be to:
- Implement an infrastructure to support the collaborative generation of “A guide to blended learning in the knowledge era”
Other related outcomes that I’d be happy to be part of, as long as I’m not stepping on anyone else’s turf:
- Collaboratively generate a resource of fun activities based on sound learning strategies for introducing new free tools to learners (both students and facilitators).
- (edited according to Roisin’s comments) building teachers’ capacity to transform their teaching approaches to enable the development of engaging, community driven and technology-rich blended learning environments.
- ensuring that copyright is strictly adhered to.
- Involve users of the resource in the creation of new content as they discover new tools or applications or activities in their area of expertise.
- ??
I’m planning this resource to compliment/support the possible Learnscope team project “Continuous Learning with Evolving Free and Open Source Software” headed by Maria Trevaskis, which is hoping to trial free and open source software in at least 4 industry areas as part of delivery of courses for students in 2005, but I’m hoping it might compliment other projects that people are working on (esp. people in the TALO community, given how formative the discussions there have been!). Hopefully this resource won’t be conflicting with any Learnscope projects - I was told that Learnscope is focused around Professional Development rather than resource development. I’m just keen to set up the infrastructure and get the ball rolling and am happy to support the needs of other projects.
So, what’s your reaction? Why would/wouldn’t you contribute to this resource? Do you know of something like the collaborative resource described that is already setup? Do you think this resource will be valuable in helping facilitators to make the transition to the new tools (and hence help their students to use them too)? Basically, is it worth setting up this infrastructure? Let me know below!