Teaching – Page 13 – Digital Learning Dispatches

A recorded video and related slide-decks are now available from the latest (12th May) presentations in the Moodle Munch webinar series. Last week’s webinar included a talk by Suzanne Stone and Karen Buckley from the NIDL’s Teaching Enhancement Unit on how the principles of Universal Design for Learning have been embedded in Moodle through the development of a related toolkit. This was followed by a presentation reporting the digital architecture at Hibernia College located in the wider context of the DigCompEdu Competence Framework.

• Presentation 01 Slides: UDL Toolkit for Moodle

• Presentation 02 Slides: Moodle: part of digital architecture for T&L

Our next webinar in the MoodleMunch series takes place on Tuesday 2nd June. DCU will deliver a presentation on its Moodle integration with the video service Unicam, which allows students to express themselves in video format for learning and assessment activities. Dublin Business School will present on its integrated system to capture, organise and share recorded lectures and related resources with its learners. You can register to attend this webinar on Zoom. A full MoodleMunch schedule is also available in this document.

Even before the current COVID-19 health crisis, “blended learning” was one of the most discussed and researched teaching approaches or modalities in higher education. As Charles Dziuban, Peter Shea and Patsy Moskal (2020) write in a recent article appearing in Educause Review:

“Greater reliance on blended learning may be what a post-COVID-19 higher education landscape will turn to for a variety of reasons, so a better conceptual understanding is much needed (P.1).”

So what is blended learning? How is blended learning best facilitated in higher education? Why does blended learning matter? How can we advance blended learning practices? What is the future of blended learning? If you are looking for answers to these questions, the upcoming course “Making Blended Education Work” on the FutureLearn platform might be for you.

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This free online course developed as part of the EMBED project is designed for people involved in leading the design, implementation and research into blended learning in higher education. It covers topics relevant to institutional leaders, learning technologists, practitioners, and researchers who are interested in blended learning related research and implementation strategy. The course, which the NIDL was pleased to co-author with our EMBED partners, starts through FutureLearn on 11th May.

One of the first questions we explore in Week 1 is the thorny issue of the definition of blended learning. There are many variations on the concept of blended learning at different ends of a definitional spectrum, and in this respect the course makes an important distinction between blended learning, blended teaching and blended education. By the time participants get to the final week of the course they will have an opportunity to critically reflect on some of the different perspectives and underlying assumptions of the Blended Education Maturity Model, as we challenge educators to question the future of blended learning in a post-digital world. This discussion will be facilitated by Mark Brown and Mairead Nic Giolla Mhichil from the NIDL where they will also ask how might blended learning take on a different face or new significance in the post COVID-19 era?

Whether the course is able to fully answer these questions will depend on your own perspective. As Dziuban, Shea and Moskal (2020) conclude:

“Perhaps blended learning is best considered an evolving process. Instructors change their blends during a semester, or from year to year, depending on several factors. One semester the blend works well—the next semester, much less effectively. So how does one answer the question, “Does blended learning work?” The question creates a recurring problem because of blended learning’s complexity and emergent properties where the whole is more than the sum of its parts” (P.17).