Implementing the blend

Before your activity starts, introduce students to the aims and objectives of the module, your approach, and what they’re likely to gain from it.

Introduce students to Blackboard and the tools they will be using and do not assume that students know how tools work.

You will also need to set expectations regarding their participation and ‘netiquette’ (the types of behaviour, writing style and interactions expected).

Roles of teaching staff and students

In any teaching space the role of the lecturer and student may differ.

Whether it is the student or the lecturer leading the learning reflects the underlying pedagogical approach, which is why explaining the approach being adopted is as important as the technical instructions for using a tool.

There may be instances where the student is required to actively participate in a session, perhaps teaching content to other students to demonstrate their understanding or adopting the feedback role usually performed by the lecturer.

The lecturer may be adopt a didactic approach to deliver new content, or facilitative approach, for example in discussions.

These roles are established within face-to-face environments implicitly.

Online these may need to be explicitly established, particularly where students are required to lead their own learning or there are expectations over interactions, in particular feedback.

The facility of the tool will depend upon the expectations for contribution, which is why it is helpful to establish these parameters before choosing the tool.

Example: Asynchronous discussion board

Underpinned by a social constructivist pedagogy, some distance learning programmes require students to address a particular discussion topic creating text-based posts to a discussion space.

Their posts reflect their own experiences, application of theory and reflections on their understanding.

They are encouraged to reflect on each other’s posts, to debate or question and through doing so are exposed to others’ understanding in order to improve their own.

This type of activity is student-focused, where knowledge is not delivered by the lecturer, but developed through social interactions.

Students will need to understand that the success of the activity, and hence their learning, will be dependent upon the contributions they make.

One approach to address this would be to encourage students to establish ‘ground rules’ for participation at the start of the activity.

These ground rules establish expectations for participation and the lecturer will also need to add their own ground rules as to how they will contribute and provide feedback on student work.

Setting expectations

Expectations can be set by the lecturer, or as described above, collectively agreed by students for longer term activities.

By setting clear parameters for engagement, students become aware of the value of the activity through the way both lecturer and students are expected to contribute.

At this stage in your learning design implementation, consider both expectations for students and staff:

Expectation checklist for students

1. What to contribute (quantity, quality, how is this assessed/measured)
2. Where to contribute
3. When to contribute (deadline for each stage, eg initial contribution, reply, summary)

Expectation checklist for staff

1. When contributions will be looked at (the cut-off point for student contribution)
2. When feedback will be provided (this may be feedback or some other form of lecturer activity)
3. Where and in what form the feedback will be provided (this could be in the face-to-face session, eg summary of discussion, addressing common misconceptions)

The instructions do not have to be extensive, as the following example shows.

Example: Expectation setting for a discussion activity

[Discussion topic, objective of the discussion, article and structured questions to consider would go here.]

Make an initial post to the discussion board by Tuesday 23 June, identifying the key issue from the article you are exploring and justifying or challenging the point made. Then, respond to at least two people by Tuesday 30 June, providing an example from your own practice in support of or contrary to the issue highlighted.

Your seminar leader will review your contributions on Tuesday 30 June and the in-class discussion topic will focus upon selected similarities and differences between different practitioners.

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For longer duration blended design, establishing an online community through ice-breakers or introductory exercises that encourage knowledge-sharing and discussion will help students feel at ease contributing in an online space.

Collective ownership of the space can be created by welcoming students online and responding to their questions, or allowing flexibility in how the online space is designed. 

Before the activity

Directing students to the activity

If you have the opportunity to introduce your online activity in class, show students where to find the activity during a teaching session.

Clear signposting ensures students spend more time on task and less time clicking links to get to resources and activity spaces.

Group size

You may need to break larger timetabling groups down into smaller groups for online working.

As discussed by Jacques and Salmon (2007, p.161), online groups of 10-15 people are about right for ease of facilitation and encouraging participation from most of the people in the group.

Smaller groups, while easier for the facilitator to manage, may suffer from a lack of diversity of viewpoints and set a high expectation for levels of contribution, in particular in discussion-based tasks.

Larger groups are more difficult to facilitate and can be dominated by a select few or cliques of participants based on friendship groups or workplaces.

Getting a good balance between diversity of students, while also ensuring the group is not too large so that everyone still feels able to contribute something fresh to the discussion will help to engage students in the activity.

Ice-breaking

While students may already be familiar with each other in the face-to-face space, if there is group collaboration only in the online space, you should design in an ice-breaker activity. Ice-breakers are essential for activities that:

• require students to share personal perceptions or experiences,
• require participation from all students for success, or
• have long-term investment, for example a module-long project.

These activities are part of the group forming process, establishing a common approach to contributions and rules of engagement.

It also allows students to form their online identity and voice that may be different from how they would contribute in face-to-face environments.

For example a shy student may find it easier to write their contributions in an online forum using the time and space to think about their responses that they wouldn’t otherwise have in the classroom environment.

Throughout the activity, you will need to provide ongoing support to students to minimise any anxiety and build confidence in line with the expectations you have set for participation.

You can encourage students to help each other, but do not use this as a substitute for your own contribution and interaction with students.

Actively guide and facilitate online; model the learning you wish students to undertake; provide feedback; encourage students to initiate discussion topics and share resources.

Facilitating discussion

In online discussion activities, the role of the lecturer will be that of a facilitator.

The role is not to impart knowledge but to tease out understanding from the students and encourage participation.

The first step is to ensure any discussion-based activity is triggered by a starter post.

Starting discussions

If you are using a discussion board, set up a starter post for each thread of the discussion.

This makes it clear to students where to post on specific topics.

As an example, if you had three case studies that you wanted students to respond to, set up three separate discussions, one for each case study.

The starter post would usually include the instructions for the activity, reiterating the expectations, and any relevant content students will be responding to.

While this may seem like duplicating content, as the starter post is in the same location as the students contributions, students are not needing to cross-reference between the discussion board and other web pages.

This approach also makes it easy to save a copy of discussions to a file that includes the original context of the activity.

For longer duration activities you may not be actively participating, however you will need to monitor student participation and intervene if necessary.

You may need to monitor student activity either online or in terms of how they bring back online outputs to in-person sessions.

Use approaches such as commenting on student contributions to reinforce connections between online and class-based activities.

While the lecturer is the traditional facilitator, such actions may be devolved to others in the group.

Part of the role of the facilitator will be to monitor the forms of contribution, as such you may encounter negative behaviours that will need addressing in much the same way as in class.

You may wish to speak to individuals ‘offline’ or rather outside the discussion space, for example by email, rather than a public reprimand.

Else, other approaches that more directly challenge a point of view from a critical, academic perspective may be appropriate.

There are positive actions that the facilitator should perform during an activity, such as:

• Providing examples
• Restating participants’ contributions to check understanding
• Clarifying, synthesising and summarising
• Timekeeping
• Directly inviting participation from individuals.

Adapted from: Jacques and Salmon (2007, p.175).

Resolve outstanding online issues in final class sessions, closing any open discussion and making sure all student queries have been addressed.

Re-emphasise the links between the online process and class-based activities with particular attention to learning outcomes.

Providing a summary of an online discussion or key components of online contributions will highlight how far an individual or group as met the intended learning outcomes.

The summary may highlight areas for further discussion, gaps in understanding or signal the closure of the activity in order to move onto the next.

Approaches to ‘weaving and summarising’ suggested by Jacques and Salmon (2007, p.190) include:

• Thanking and praising participants who contributed
• Highlight new takes on topics, diversity of perspectives
• Reiterate significant learning points
• Suggest follow-up questions or further reading
• Link to subsequent learning activities.

This approach seeks to provide feedback on students’ online activities and to prompt students to reflect on their performance.

In addition to reflecting on the learning of students, you should include opportunities for reflecting on your teaching practice. This may be a self reflection, use of student module feedback or peer-review. Thinking back over Sections 4 and 5, you should assess:

• The appropriateness of the tool and space for the learning objective
• The instructions provided to students to complete the task
• The technical support available to students
• Your approach to facilitation and guiding students towards learning objectives
• Whether learning outcomes were met.

You may wish to include specific questions about the learning activity in your module evaluation or explore the online interactions and student contributions.