Planning your blended learning course unit
You’ve been asked to complete a blended learning template for your course unit – the material here gives some practical advice and information that will enable you to structure and design your teaching, learning and assessment activities in a blended format.
- What is this? Guidance and templates to support you in preparing a plan for converting your course to blended-online teaching. This guidance focuses on replacing lectures and practice activities (there is separate guidance for labs and assessment).
- Who is this for? These materials are mainly aimed at unit leaders who will be designing the changes to the courses, but are also useful for programme directors and anyone who will be teaching on these units.
- How long should this take? We hope you can go through the core of the material in less than a day.
Part 1: What is different with blended learning?
- Guidance: Why is online different? (text and video)
Part 2: Setting expectations and building community
- Guidance: Setting expectations and building community (text)
- Planning document: Planning template (.xls, 33kb), filled example (.xls, 35kb)
Part 3: Planning content and activities
- Guidance: Planning your blended course’s structure, content and activities
- Supplementary guidance: FSECV19-blended learning guidance, Online collaborative activities
- Planning document: Planning template (.xls, 33kb), filled example (to follow)
In addition, one of the best ways of learning how to enhance your online teaching skills is to become an online learner yourself. We recommend these short, self-paced online courses. However, please go through the Faculty materials outlined above first, as we want to ensure our students get a consistent experience where possible.
OpenLearn: Take your teaching online (24 hours’ study)
FutureLearn: How To Teach Online: Providing Continuity for Students (6 hours’ study)
Coursera: Learning to Teach Online (17 hours’ study)
The link for the supplementary guidance on online collaborative activities appears to be missing.
Hi Andrea, the article is still in development, should be there soon. Thanks for your patience.
One of the course units I teach will certainly be fully online, there is a good chance that the other will not have any on campus classes either. In what way this be considered blended learning?
Hi Gabor, Things are certainly changing fast and the plans for the next academic year are a bit more fully formed than when this article was first published.
As this Article from Dan George and Video from Steve Pettifer suggests, the terms applied here are often overlapping/interchangeable so don’t worry if your “blended course” looks more like a “fully online course”. The important part is to ensure we’re delivering as high a quality Teaching and Learning Experience as we can.
https://blogs.manchester.ac.uk/viewpoint/2020/09/17/blended-and-flexible-learning/
http://www.elearning.fse.manchester.ac.uk/fseta/moving-to-blended-learning-part-1-terminology-and-concepts/
The University is keen to provide some on-campus Teaching to students…
https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/news/display/?id=24891