Mathematics

only a week) and for the whole course. Maybe due to this, the learning
outcomes of the course fell still too much in the category ‘knowing’, not in the
category ‘applying’.
4 Adapted design: making the learning process more flexible
At the moment, we are adding new aspects to the course. The incentive for
this lies partly in a changing policy towards blended learning of our institute
and partly in the appearance of a new group of students who are taking the
course. We will explain this in the first subsection. In the second we will
describe theoretical models for this new approach, which are partially
developed by us. Although this new design has not been tested with the
course School Mathematics yet (this will happen in the spring of 2015), we did
try it out in a course with learning goals quite similar in nature to the ones of
School Mathematics. We will report on our findings in the last subsection.
4.1 Further desiderata
For the university, an important goal for adopting blended learning is flexibility
for students. In subsection 2.1 we mentioned that students struggle to balance
work, study and private life and flexibility on the part of their study could help
them with this. But there are other important incentives, namely opening up
education for potential student groups that cannot participate in the old
situation. As an example, we will consider the distant Dutch province of
Limburg – distant from the point of view of Utrecht, where the HU university of
applied sciences is located. Although there is a shortage of teachers for preuniversity
level in this region, there is no institute nearby offering teacher
education at this level. The HU University made an agreement with the school
associations in the Limburg region to provide education in a form where
students do not have to visit Utrecht on a weekly basis – but, in fact, only eight
times a year. There are other parts of the country where the university is
involved in similar developments.
The pitfall of economizing on the frequency of classroom activity is that the
learning process becomes more individual, less social. For us, the social
aspect was very important – especially for pedagogy courses. Not only is there
strong evidence in the literature that deep learning is a social process (in the
context of blended learning we refer to e.g., Laurillard 2002 or Reinmann-
Rothmeier 2003), but we believe activity in a peer group is also an important
factor in avoiding students dropping out during courses. Therefore, we wanted
students to collaborate and work together weekly, despite the fact that this
may not happen in the university buildings. This is the reason that the peer
group is important in the blended learning philosophy of the HU.
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