Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

to know each other a bit. We are people with faces and life stories now, not just
online cyberspace companions.
It makes it much easier to interact with people you have met face-to-face, even
though it’s sometimes easier to be more anonymous, more distant. I have used
(I think!) a Moodle before ... or something very similar, with the Open University
so this wasn’t, or should I say isn’t, my first time.
The face-to-face part of the course was particularly helpful in creating a good
relationship between the course participants.
■■ As previously noted, participants with no online learning experience can find the
idea of online training intimidating. Starting with the face-to-face component can
help allay these fears, and provide a more gentle introduction to online training for
more reluctant participants. In addition, participants may feel that a face-to-face
approach simply suits them better:
I feel I have learned and progressed satisfactorily in the course, but that given my
learning style I preferred the face-to-face component more than the online one.
Design decisions
The blended version of the Cert ICT offers the first 50 of the 120 hours as a faceto-face
option – either intensively over two weeks, or part-time over ten weeks
(depending on the local market and the time of year of delivery). Once those 50
hours have been completed face-to-face, the remaining 70 hours of the course are
taken online in a virtual learning environment (VLE) called Moodle (www.moodle.org).
The face-to-face component uses a communicative training approach. Participants
each bring a laptop to the face-to-face sessions, and they work on these throughout
the course, learning how to use certain ICT tools and producing regular outputs. The
face-to-face component is also paperless – all handouts/worksheets/resources are
found on the course Moodle. Participants download these as needed during the faceto-face
sessions, and save them on their own computers. Thus, the course Moodle
functions as a course repository in the face-to-face component of the course, which
is slowly built up over the 50 hours face-to-face. At the beginning of each face-toface
session, handouts are made available in the Moodle, which are then used as
necessary. In the next session, more materials are made available. It is important not
to overload participants by providing all the course resources at once in Moodle –
by slowly revealing them session-by-session, participants are far more able to digest
and use the resources provided. This is something that participants often appreciate:
Very clear layout, loved having only one week’s tasks and content at a time, not
too much stuff at once.
One of the design decisions we made is to introduce Moodle before the face-toface
component starts (with a few very simple tasks for participants to complete
– see above), and then to use it as a repository of materials, and also to share work
produced in each face-to-face session. This means that by the time participants
get to the online component of the course, they are already familiar with the basic
functions of Moodle, and use it on a regular basis.
Reversing the blend: From online to blended | 79