Here - EnglishAgenda - British Council

The learner and the contextAlthough China has in recent years adopted online learning approaches forstudents and teachers, it has not been seen as particularly successful. ‘Manyuniversities and colleges in China have carried out numerous experiments withe-learning but have not achieved the expected results’ (Huang and Zhou, 2007).One of the expected results was to use online learning to train teachers and studentsacross vast distances. These expected results though, were not really met due to avariety of reasons including weak independent learning strategies of students andteachers, and teachers not being used to taking courses online. What is more, thequality of online courses is often seen as being inferior to face-to-face instruction.In addition, there is still an overwhelming preference by education authorities andteachers to have a foreign trainer (a native-speaker), in person, deliver the training.There is an assumption that the foreign trainer will have access to the most recentknowledge the participants need, and a high value is placed on the cultural andlinguistic interaction the participants will have with that foreign trainer.In addition, the UK is seen by Chinese education authorities as being a leader ineducation, especially in the field of assessment.Why a blended approach?Before designing the training programme we assessed the needs of the participants,taking into account the local context and expectations of all stakeholders, inparticular the local education authorities we would be working with. This needsanalysis led us to identify a series of lower level objectives, underneath the widerobjective to improve the test writing skills of the participants.When we addressed course design, it seemed clear to us that there were threeobjectives that would be best achieved via face-to-face interaction, and theseneeded to happen at the beginning of the course. They were:1. Participants would need to make a shift in their mind-set (that they neededcommunicative tests and the impact of such tests would be positive).2. Participants would need to build trust with the trainer and each other.3. It was important to satisfy the cultural demand for the ‘foreign trainer’.We therefore designed a four-day, face-to-face course that would give participantsthe learning opportunities to meet those objectives.However, there were more objectives that we felt would be best met by some formof online interaction and study. These were:1. To provide information and the latest up-to-date knowledge on assessmentfrom the UK.2. To appeal to a variety of learning styles.3. To connect the learning to the participants’ workplace and local context.4. To allow participants to develop their own tests and to learn at their own pace.84 | Reversing the blend: From online to blended