Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

Comments on Part 2
Brian Tomlinson
A blended learning approach seems to be ideal for developing teacher development
courses. Whether the courses are initial or in-service the trainees are typically very
busy, geographically spread, with different levels and types of experience, with
different amounts of time available to complete their course, with convictions about
their preferred styles and modes of learning and with the need for varying amounts
of feedback and support. Face-to-face courses can satisfy many of these needs but
they do require all the trainees to be together at the same location and at the same
predetermined time, and it is not easy for the trainers to provide sufficient individual
feedback and support. Online courses can solve many of the logistical problems, can
help the trainees to focus on their individual needs and can provide individualised
feedback and support. However, they cannot really provide the reality and stimulus
that live experience of observing classes, being observed teaching classes and
interacting with peers can. Blended learning can achieve all that is needed though,
by dividing the course into those components which require face-to-face interaction
and those which can be best delivered online. This is what all the courses described
in Part 2 have done and all of them seem to have been successful. It would, of course
though, be very informative if one group of trainees followed a purely face-to-face
course, an equivalent group followed an online course with the same content and
another equivalent group followed a blended course with the same content. If the
trainees were shadowed after their courses we could find indications as to the
actual benefits of blended learning teacher development courses in relation to
the outcomes of the experience for the trainees.
One of the many bonuses of a blended learning approach to teacher development
is the affordance of choice to the trainees. Many of the teacher development
courses reported in Part 2 offer the trainees the choice of doing the course faceto-face,
online or in a blended version. This is a great advantage as some trainees
cannot afford the time or money to do a course away from home, some are already
electronically proficient and want to make use of this proficiency and others have
a strong preference for learning face-to-face or an antipathy towards electronic
learning. Also a number of the blended learning courses in Part 2 encourage the
trainees to decide for themselves how much and which components of a course they
want to do in online modes, and which they want to do face-to-face. This choice of
modes is very important as trainees who are comfortable with, and positive about,
where and how they learn are more likely to benefit from a course than those who
are not (Tomlinson, 2013a).
Another bonus reported in a number of chapters in Part 2 is that blended learning
teacher development courses can stimulate trainees to think of making use of
blended learning approaches in their own teaching. Experiencing different modes
of delivery and different resources and procedures within each mode can help
trainees to evaluate these possibilities not only in relation to their own development
but in relation to their post-course teaching too. It is arguable therefore, that the
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