Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

in the form of a word processed document). The trainer has an essentially passive
role, monitoring progress and only intervening if it appears that a team is going
off the rails.
Evaluation of activities
In a course covering a wide range of management areas, some activities are more
appropriate or effective than others. For instance, a task in financial management
intended to apply specific processes will have an outcome which will be either right
or wrong. By contrast, a critical incident in HRM may have more than one possible
solution to the problem posed. The kind of online discussion in the former will be
mostly concerned with the mechanics of achieving the correct outcome, whereas in
the latter, the discussion will consider alternative scenarios and consequences, while
also making connections to parallel issues in the participants’ own work context.
By and large, tasks which are simple in design, with a minimum amount of textual
material, and which are relevant to the workplace, but allow for a range of responses
from simple to complex, are the most effective at encouraging participation,
collaboration and lateral learning. For instance, reading articles which have an
interesting angle on a topic and which can then be mapped onto the participants’
own contexts seems to generate most discussion.
In fact, the key variable appears to be the group itself. Some groups establish a very
productive dynamic during the face-to-face phase which they then carry over to the
online part of the course, whereas in other groups, there may be one or two ‘lurkers’
who make limited or no contribution, regardless of the activity. The problem then is
that such people are seen to be ‘passengers’ by active participants, and the effect
on team morale and functioning can be noticeable in the simulation. However, as
one of the aspects of the simulation is to actually comment on the effectiveness of
online teams and problems that arise in the operation of such teams, this ‘problem’
is addressed in the sense that participants are able to discuss how they reacted to
such situations.
In all of these activities, the VLE plays a crucial role. This is particularly well
demonstrated in the fourth activity type described in the previous section. In fact,
in the type of blended learning that has evolved on the IDLTM, the VLE is an integral
component and virtually none of the range of blended learning activities would be
possible without the use of a VLE.
When it comes to synchronous activities, some have proven to be problematic for
a number of reasons. Firstly, participants are often in widely dispersed time zones,
which can make scheduling of chat sessions very problematic. Secondly, managing
chat sessions with more than four or five participants is difficult, and despite
establishing simple procedures to facilitate optimum participation, moderating
such sessions is both challenging and taxing. Different solutions or approaches
have been tried, from text-based chat to full webcam-supported audio-visual chat,
but no solution has proved to be all things to all people. Some participants have
even commented that after a while they found it more useful to not attend the chat
sessions, and instead read the transcript afterwards, as it was more conducive to
96 | Blended learning: The IDLTM experience