Blended Learning - interaction between classroom and online activities

There several kinds of e-learning. One is distance learning, where all interactions between tutor and students and between students themselves are electronic. So students never see one another face to face. By contrast are traditional classroom based courses which are augmented by access to a repository of information held on a VLE. In between are many blended learning courses which augment their face to face interactions by various forms of electronic communication.

Blended learning is often described as though there was no interaction between the face to face and electronic components of a course. Which is surprising because the culture within a classroom affects educational outcomes, as does the culture which exists within online facilities such as forums and wikis. We should not be surprised then if in a blended learning course the online and the offline cultures interact.

This is what a colleague observed recently. She asked the students in a class she met every week to add summaries of papers on defined topics to a wiki . The wiki allowed all students to see and edit each others contributions. There were no marks for completing this exercise. And yet all the students made their regular required contributions. This was even though, as some evaluation responses showed, some students thought that posting to a wiki was not a useful activity if they were not to be given credit for it.

The reason for the engagement of all the students with the online activity seemed to lie in what went on in the classroom, the offline activity. At each weekly meeting students were reminded that they should be contributing to the wiki. In a small class it was obvious who had and who hadn't contributed. Students were told that the final wiki would be of help to the whole class when it came to revision for the final exam. So those who were not contributing could be seen as letting down the other students. In short there was social pressure.

Social pressure also manifested itself in the use that was made of the wiki. Students posted, as they had been asked to do, summaries of papers. But they were also told that they could comment on each others contributions. There were no such comments. There could be several reasons for this. One might have been that since there were no marks for the postings, students simply put the minimum effort into the wiki. However another possibility was that students didn't want to criticise in a public forum fellow students that they met with on a daily basis. If this was the case it raises the possibility that the use students make of online facilities will be influenced by the nature and extent of their offline interactions. One might hypothesise that the contributions to a wiki or forum for a distance learning course, run completely online, would be less concerned with their affect on the feelings of other students. Of course, such an effect might fade over the duration of a distance learning course, as students got to know each other through electronic interaction.

It seems that the delivery of blended learning courses requires more than simply adding electronic facilities to an existing course. The interaction between the online and the offline can be quite subtle.