How Blended Instruction Affects Student Experience

From the past year's experience, I have discovered that the most effective methods in teaching online are collaborative. This collaboration, and the ease with which it can be accomplished, is one of the greatest changes possible in an online course. Because the students are not bound to time and place, the collaboration need not be synchronous. In the end, the quality of the project is not determined by whether or not Joey got enough sleep last night, or whether Dorica had a fight with her best friend at lunch. Generally, that means students can do their best work—whenever that best work has to happen.

This collaboration and the availability of online resources require a new look at what we mean by “cheating”--some of the traditional resources on the Web viewed as “cheating tools” are used by the students to help them learn. If SparkNotes can help a kid learn about the motifs of Pride and Prejudice so that they can write about it more effectively, then why not allow the resource? Kids know that these resources are out there, and their vision of “cheating” has changed in every class. Teachers need to harness that knowledge first—know what resources the kids are using—and then formulate a new position statement of sorts to address whatever it is that we used to call “cheating”

The shift to a blended course carries any subject into modernity. Writing is different when done with a pen, with a typewriter, on a word processor, or in IM chat. Students instinctively get that. What teachers need to do is be able to incorporate all styles of writing—not just writing across the curriculum, but writing across the person. In IM chat and gaming, these expressions makes sense:
lol kk ttyl gtg ;) rofl afk brb cya noob pwn. Most chatters don't bother with capitalization or punctuation either, and the walls of civilization have not crumbled. I am altering my discussion board etiquette for next year to allow for (school-appropriate) chat codes—I use them online myself, anyway, so why not?

Connections between the subject and the computer itself are natural. Students who enter a literature course taught online seem to be naturally seeking this connection. The curriculum can reflect that, so our study of Frankenstein incorporates contemporary thinking on computer brains and identity. In any classroom these connections can be made. Students in my wife's Biology class once created a model of a cell using the parts of a computer to represent the different cell structures: cell wall, mitochondria, etc.

Aside from a broad experience of literature and its related themes, there are two learning goals I hope my students gain through an experience in a blended classroom. First, they need to understand their role as individual and independent learners, since they must take responsibility for their own learning in such a course, and since this seems to be the wave of the day (not of the future). Second, they need to understand their roles as participants in a collaborative culture that expects engaged participants, not sideliners watching as others do the work.