Here - EnglishAgenda - British Council

6Reversing the blend:From online to blendedGavin Dudeney and Nicky HocklyIntroductionAt The Consultants-E, we offer fully online in-service training courses for practisinglanguage teachers. All of our training courses focus on helping teachers to learnhow to effectively integrate information and communication technologies (ICT)in a principled manner, in their face-to-face and/or online teaching.The courseThis case study looks at one of our longer courses, the Cert ICT: Certificate inTeaching Languages with Technology, which is fully validated by Trinity CollegeLondon. The course itself grew from a shorter, four-week course that was therecipient of a British Council ELTon in 2007. In its current form the course wasfirst developed and run as a completely online 120-hour course. We launched anadditional blended version of the qualification in 2009. In the blended Cert ICT,50 hours of the total 120 hours are offered face-to-face. This is followed by theremaining 70 hours being taken online.Our decision to review a blended approach responded to the inherent advantagesof both face-to-face and online instruction:Those who use blended approaches base their pedagogy on the assumptionthat there are inherent benefits in face-to-face interaction (both among learnersand between learner and instructor) as well as the understanding that thereare some inherent advantages to using online methods in their teaching.Thus the aim of those using blended learning approaches is to find a harmoniousbalance between online access to knowledge and face-to-face human interaction.(Osguthorpe and Graham, 2003)Added to these general notions of playing to the strengths of each method, we alsoidentified a number of pedagogical and practical reasons for deciding to offer ablended version of the course:■■The course content (the development of ICT skills) lends itself well to face-to-facedelivery, as tutors can physically help participants while they work with a range ofICT tools, in situ. Although this is also achievable online, the process of identifyingissues and providing hands-on help can be more challenging online for tutors,and require Skype calls, or developing screencasts to help with specific issues.In this respect we refer to issues with learning and manipulating softwareReversing the blend: From online to blended | 75