blended learning

The transcription discusses trends in online and blended learning in higher education. It highlights the importance of student engagement, communication, accessibility, collaboration, and teacher professional development. Active learning activities, connecting current learning to previous experiences, and providing frequent feedback are key strategies for student engagement. Effective communication includes maintaining contact with students, clearly communicating expectations, and utilizing various methods of communication. Accessibility standards are often neglected, but it is crucial to ensure that all learners can participate in the learning process. Collaboration involves creating an environment for students to engage with each other and work together. Teacher professional development is essential, especially in higher education, where online learning is growing. Educators need training in technology and online learning environments. Incorporating best practices in course developme Hi, this is Stacey Kiltz. Today, we will be reviewing trends in online and blended learning in higher education. Research continues to be done on the best practices for online and blended learning. Today, we're going to talk about trends with student engagement, communication, accessibility for all learners, collaboration, and teacher professional development. Best practices for student engagement, getting the students involved with the content, include the use of active learning activities, and also connecting their current learning to previous experiences. Because we are talking about higher education students, most of them are coming with life experience, personal. The first important trend to talk about in regards to online and blended learning is student engagement. The best way to achieve the student engagement is the use of active learning activities. If you're online, the use of the camera helps create a greater sense of collaboration, which will help with engagement. You can use the tools of the platform you're using to administer polls, have the students respond via chat. You also want to connect current learning to previous experiences. In higher education, you're dealing with students who come with history. They come with life experience, work experience, family experience, and their own cultural and religious backgrounds. Since we all learn differently, there are ways to increase engagement by varying the submission methods, not always using a test, sometimes maybe using a written assignment, sometimes a creative assignment like developing a voice over PowerPoint. The most important aspect of student engagement is to provide frequent feedback. The students will quickly fall back and not engage if they don't feel that what they're saying matters. So it's important for the instructor to provide that feedback. Chunking is a good method to use to increase student engagement because the human mind can only tolerate so much information at one time, and our length of attention is very limited. So 15 to 30-minute segments of instruction followed by a review activity or some sort of way to reinforce the content before moving on to another content chunk is a good way of making sure the students stay engaged and don't get overwhelmed. In the research, Lynn et al. found that the student's biggest complaint about asynchronous and synchronous online learning is that they don't feel connected to the class or the instructor. So engagement becomes really important because if you don't keep the student connected, the lack of connectedness will impact their performance and can impact course evaluations. The research also shows the benefit of providing multiple ways for students to engage in the learning because they are all individuals and coming to the classroom with a variety of backgrounds. Maximizing communication is another key component when using online and blended learning in higher education. You want to maintain that contact with the students. You want to clearly communicate expectations. As an educator, you do have to check for understanding, so include some assessments in there to make sure that they are understanding the assignments. You can use multiple methods of communication, not only email, but you can also use the group chat function or you can use text. An essential component in your communication is your LMS, your learning management system. Maintaining a standard course format is important so that students can have some familiarity as they go from course to course, seeing the same information in the same places. The research also finds that it's important for the teacher especially to have a presence in the classroom. The community of inquiry framework talks about social, cognitive, and teacher presence, but the teacher presence is important because the students want to feel that interaction with the instructor. They don't want to feel like they're doing this all on their own. Video enhances communication, so whether it's just the instructor using video or sometimes allowing students to choose whether they want to have the video on or not, or requiring it at some junctures with some activities and not with others, allows for you to still have some ability to assess those nonverbal cues Another essential trend in online and blended learning is one that's often neglected, and research shows that many resources and courses don't actually comply to accessibility standards that are out there, so that all learners, regardless of their abilities or their different learning abilities, have the ability to participate in the learning process The best practices for the online learning include using a universal design for learning. There are also certain elements of accessibility, according to Eaton, that should be included in every course to meet the current standards, which is the WCAG 2.1 AA, which is the WCAG 2.0, which is the WCAG 2.1 AA standard, but as the research shows, not many people are doing it to begin with. We need to get more instructors involved in knowing how to do this, and also we need the materials to be tested to make sure that they're meeting those accessibility guidelines, according to Lewis. Collaboration goes beyond just communication or student engagement. It sort of encompasses parts of both of them while also trying to set up an environment where there is maximum potential for students engaging with each other and working together. The effectiveness of collaboration seems to be more present in synchronous activities. Ismaeloff and Hsu found that students feel that the activities in courses that were completely asynchronous were more contrived and made up rather than where there was some synchronous activity. Shearer et al. discussed the implications of the community of inquiry framework when talking about collaboration, making sure that you're covering the social, cognitive, and teacher presences of that framework. So utilizing the ISTE standards for the use of technology in online learning, providing multiple formats for course materials, collaborative projects using discussion boards, different ways to have the students collaborate so it's not always, oh, we're doing another discussion board post. Get them into other activities, like the projects or the peer-reviewed articles. And of course, you can't talk about education and online learning without talking about teacher preparedness, teacher professional development. What COVID-19 demonstrated was that not everyone was prepared to move to technology. We need online education training to be included in teacher preparation. We especially need that in higher education where online learning is going to continue to see major growth as colleges try to downsize facilities, compete for fewer students, yet maximize their income. A lot of higher education instructors are content matter experts, but they need that training in the technology. They need to know that LMS and what its capabilities are. They should be familiar with the ISTE standards for educators. Whether it be planned programs by the university that they're working for, independent study, micro-credentials, there are resources out there for teacher professional development to get them more comfortable with the online learning environment. Ecclesiastes chapter 9, verse 10 tells us, whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. Educators need to incorporate best practices in the development of their courses, the learning activities, and the means for engagement. And by doing that, we fulfill the meaning of that verse. If you have any questions about the information presented today, please contact me by email at skilts at liberty.edu. Thank you.