Blending Online and Classroom Activities
When you start using a VLE, you may find it difficult to balance online student activities with face-to-face interactions. It may seem unclear to you whether some activities should be entirely online. This usually depends on two factors: the proximity of the students and the learning goals.
Distance learning students will have limited scope for dialogue with you and their peers, so you will have to help them use the VLE to support all their interactions (Timms et al, 1999; Ingraham et al, 2001). This not only includes discussions about concepts and ideas they are learning about, but also the social interactions that are an essential component of learning (see Introduction to VLEs section and also Salmon, 2002 for a good overview of this topic). If your students are based on campus, a major part of their learning comes from the everyday face-to-face social interactions they have: chatting in a cafe or over lunch, working together out of class and chatting in the classroom (whether you like it or not!). They will have opportunity to engage in a range of face-to-face interactions (in classroom settings or lectures and tutorials) that enable then to discuss ideas with you and with their peers. This provides you with considerable scope for integrating real and virtual learning activities through 'blended learning'.
The second factor concerns the learning goals. If you would like your students to learn how the structure of molecules relates to the outcome of a chemical experiment, it may be useful to allow your students to view online animations or simulations that allow them to visualise molecular structures and view how these interact. This is a particularly useful way of teaching students who have a more 'visual' bias in their learning style. However, if you want them to learn a laboratory technique, they are likely to learn much more from being in the laboratory. It can be difficult to strike a good balance between integrating face-to-face activities with online interactions (such as simulations and online chat).
Confusion partly arises because online interactions are often viewed as analogous to face-to-face communications. In reality, these types of interactions are very different, yet they are associated with a similar metaphor. For example a 'bulletin board discussion' or 'internet relay chat' may appear similar to a classroom discussion, because all of these involve some sort of dialogue. Clearly the types of social interactions afforded by these three tools will vary. Therefore, one tool is likely to be more appropriate to a particular learning situation than the other two (Nicol et al, 2003). When designing a course, it is important to take into account the potential of all three.
Although VLEs can support new ways of learning, recent studies provide evidence that most tutors are using VLEs primarily for delivering learning materials, such as course notes, handouts and class information (Crook and Barrowcliff, 2001; Crook, 2002; Britain and Liber, 2004). This is probably partly because electronic delivery of content is relatively easy. However designing effective e-learning requires time, careful planning and skill. That is not to say that delivering content is bad practice - it simply does not fully harness the power of communication technologies. The following sections will examine strategies that will allow you to deliver content to your students efficiently and to explore ways to support more active methods of student learning.
