Blended Learning
25 Creating a Blended Learning Activity
Practice & Apply
Objective:
Plan a precise blended learning activitiy to use in your course.
Directions:
In previous chapters, we’ve reviewed a number of resources that help explain how blended learning can work and the tools you can use to plan and implement blended learning in an organized and thoughtful manner. In this chapter, we will bring this material together and create a blended learning activity. We are bringing back several of the resources we’ve reviewed thus far to help guide us toward the completion of an activity that you can implement in your course. To complete the activity, follow the outline below and answer the “Key Questions” for each of the five steps. When you are finished, you will have a complete blended activity.
Step 1. Identify and reflect upon a prior learning activity:
Since we’re taking a previous activity or topic and redesigning it to a blended learning framework, we will start by thinking about that prior experience and how it worked for your class.
Key Questions:
- What is the learning activity?
- What worked well with the assignment?
- What challenges did you or your students experience?
- Were there special materials you developed for the activity or topic?
- Was the topic formally assessed? How?
- How much time was devoted to the topic in class? Out of class?
- How much time would you like to devote to your blended learning activity in class? Out of class?
Step 2. Define your learning objectives:
The learning objectives are the foundation for the entire activity. Writing out clear and measurable objectives will help guide the remaining steps in the development of your activity. Remember to use a specific verb (avoid “understand” or “know”) when crafting your learning objectives.
Key Questions:
- What do you want your students to know or do upon completion of the activity?
- At what level of Bloom’s Taxonomy do you hope to position the objective (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create)?
- What are the specific learning objectives for your activity?
Suggested Resources:
- Week 2 Learning Objective Material
- UW Essential Learning Outcomes
- Bloom’s Taxonomy
- Writing Good Learning Objectives – I-Tech
Step 3. Define your assessment goal:
Without getting into too much detail, start to think about how you’ll know whether your students have met the learning objective you defined above. Think about what you’ll need to see in order to determine whether the students have attained the goal.
Key Questions:
- How will you know whether your students have met the objectives you defined for the activity?
- Will the student need to recall information? Demonstrate a skill? Produce something?
Suggested Resource:
Professor Erica Halverson’s video on backward design from week 2.
Step 4. Consider the blended learning models:
Before we begin planning the activity, think about the blended learning models and how they might inform your decision making and param