Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

So in this way participants move from more practical applications of blended learning
towards the more theoretical exploration of the background. This gives participants
the opportunity to approach and reflect on theory with a firm background in
classroom practice.
Teaching methodology
There is a mixture of methods, approaches and beliefs that underpin the
development of the course. In some ways the course takes a ‘flipped’ approach to
teacher development with the initial online course pushing teachers to complete
tasks and interact in a very independent way and prepare themselves and lay the
groundwork for the more practical aspects of the face-to-face element of the course.
The core content of the online course is based around units containing active
learning tasks. Unlike many teacher development tasks, these are not simply reading
or viewing tasks but they call upon the participants to engage with the materials, try
to apply what they are learning within the context they work and to reflect and share
their reflections with their peer group.
Instead of recommended core texts, the core content of the course includes a
wide range of online reference materials, but this material is approached in a
non-prescriptive way. The range of references and recommended reading draws
on ELT websites, blogs and online resource sites as well as online journals.
Participants are encouraged through directed reading to critically evaluate what they
read and assess its relevance to their own context and again share their reflections
with their peers within discussion forums. The aim of this approach is to develop a
more inclusive but critical approach to online published literature. This is especially
important in such a fast-moving field where traditional paper-based reading sources
are often out of date by the time they are published and practitioners need to rely
more heavily on less established and authoritative sources of information.
Within the core online course tasks participants are encouraged to develop the kinds
of digital literacy skills and digital study skills that their own students would need to be
successful online learners. Many of the tasks focus on helping participants to develop
sound information management and knowledge sharing strategies facilitated by online
tools such as RSS readers, social bookmarking and micro-blogging platforms.
RSS (really simple syndication) is a common but underused technology which
allows visitors to subscribe to web-based content using a ‘reader’. The reader is a
personalised web page which pulls in content from the sites the user subscribes to.
In this way the user can have content from tens or even hundreds of different websites
delivered to their own personal web page. This helps to keep them informed of any
new content or research within their field without them having to constantly waste time
searching the internet and checking sites individually, although the efficiency of this
process depends very much on their ability to identify useful credible sources.
Social bookmarking allows users to store and retrieve any links to useful online
articles or resources they find. This process is slightly different from normal
68 | A blended learning teacher development course