Blended Learning in English Language Teaching: Course Design and Implementation

Figure 4: Quizzes can be in hot potatoes, Moodle’s own quiz format or an external
site such as Quizlet or Zondle.
c. Projects
We designed a series of group projects. These have several purposes:
■■ To encourage everyone to interact, online and face-to-face, and engender
a sense of community, we designed a series of group projects.
■■ We also need to get across the message that we are not delivering all the
information that they need to know, nor could we, but that they have to
become aware of what they should work on and set out to augment their
knowledge accordingly.
■■ Lastly we wanted to foster the sense that if they work together on some tasks
there could be a positive synergy, that they could help each other in useful ways
and that they could go on to use what has been created by others.
To all of the above ends, each week (or block) there is a group project. Groups are
set up with a mix of face-to-face and online participants and they are remixed every
week. Each project is set up to get them to create something that they can publish
through wikis or forums and will help other groups to revise in future. Projects are
not evaluated by tutors. Moodle facilitates online collaborations (Stanford, 2008:
58), which can be teacher-to-student or student-to-student. Asynchronous forums
and wikis allow participants time to compose their messages, which encourages
reflection as well as ‘deeper’ more considered thinking than in synchronous
exchanges (Sharma and Barrett, 2007: 107). Presentations can be crafted by
several people together before being published. End results vary enormously
but are always interesting.
Creating a blended DELTA Module One | 105