A Blended Learning Toolkit

The MDE-Lounge can come in handy.  Not only does it foster a sense of community; or should I say “social presence” in CoL parlance, but it is also a great way to discover new and handy resources.  One of the more recent posts in the lounge mentioned a blended learning toolkit.  I was prompted to check it out because last week while I was listening to the CBS Evening News there was the mention of blended learning.  This particular news segment focused on how the current downturn in the economy is negatively impacting school districts, but what especially sparked my interest was the interview with a principal from central Pennsylvania.  During this interview the principal mentioned that blended learning might be at least one creative way to address student learning needs in an environment where he didn’t expect any increase in funds for the foreseeable future.  Wow, blended learning to the rescue?!  While I am certainly not convinced that blended learning is “the” solution for all our ills in public education (nor am I implying that the principal thought this either), it certainly begs the question, What easy tools are available to implement blended learning? Well, the MDE-Lounge came to the rescue.

The toolkit I am referring to is titled The Blended Learning Toolkit and is a product of the University of Central Florida and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.  This web-based product is open source and is funded by the Next Generation Learning Challenges organization under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.  Sound familiar?  Yes, many of our readings in OMDE-610 have been provided from The Theory and Practice of Online Learning, an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons License.

The Toolkit offers a blog for user postings, a process section to help build your own blended course, effective practices, evaluation methodologies, faculty development, further research, and most valuable to me, a good number of model courses so you can actually experience some of these great products.  Go ahead, check out the site here:  http://blended.online.ucf.edu/. Although not all the courses are available to American users because of copyright restrictions from other countries, there are still many options to choose, particularly from the University of Central Florida.  One of my favorite sample courses is provided with a short introductory video by the instructor, Dr. M.C. Santana, who teaches a class on visual communication theory.  Check it out here:  http://engage.ucf.edu/v/p/pb6fvtW

Just listening to this short introductory clip makes you want to take her course, doesn’t it!  Feel free to “tool around” other classes and see what you think; another great one is provided by a philosophy professor from Yale, I’ll let you dig for this one on your own.

So is blended learning “the” solution for public schools at a time of diminishing financial support?  I am hardly prepared to make the leap and say it is, but certainly public educators should explore its capabilities in recognition that many of our students are super cyber-savvy customers.