EADTU – Page 2 – Digital Learning Dispatches

The NIDL team is pleased to be a member of the DigiTeL Pro Strategic Partnership (Professional Development for Digital Teaching and Learning) supported by funding through the Extraordinary Erasmus+ Coronavirus response. This project involves seven European university partners and is being led by EADTU, with the first full-day kick-off meeting taking place next week.

About DigiTeL

The COVID-19 crisis required many higher education institutions throughout Europe to switch overnight to online distance education. Attempts were made under challenging circumstances to create solutions for online active learning, online student interactions, both synchronously and asynchronously, and e-assessment. With the commencement of the new academic year came increased emphasis on improving the quality of the student online learning experience.

Set against this backdrop, the objective of the DigiTeL Pro Strategic Partnership is to build the capacity of higher education institutions to provide high quality, inclusive digital education, responding to the needs of universities for the remainder of the Corona crisis and beyond. The project team brings together a group of experienced online educators well-known for their research and innovation in digital education. Project outputs include an analysis of major lessons from the COVID-19 crisis, support for maturing institutional policy and strategy for the post-pandemic environment, the design, development and implementation of continuous professional development for a range of delivery modes (blended, hybrid and online distance education), and several initiatives to enhance students’ readiness for digital learning. The NIDL team is leading the student-focused work package and related deliverables.

Learn more during Empower Webinar Week

If you would like to learn more about the DigiTeL Pro Strategic Partnership, then next Tuesday, April 6th, at 13:00 (Irish time) members of the project team will be sharing further details as part of the Empower Webinar Week (6th-8th, April). During the week, you can participate in a series of webinars dedicated to better understanding the opportunities of digital education during and after the pandemic. In a webinar starting at 12:30pm (Irish time) on Wednesday April 7th, Dr Eamon Costello from the NIDL, for example, will be sharing his speculative educational futures post-pandemic. In each session there will be time reserved for reflection and questions from you, the participants.

More information on the full programme and a registration link appears on the Empower Webinar Week webpage. We look forward to sharing more over the course of the week.

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).