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As we look at quality assurance in Wk 5, the last two pillars provide ways to answer the question as to whether or not our teaching in the blended course was effective. While the 5 are really aimed at an overall view of online course quality, they also map to the blended environment. Plus, it's a short read! :)

I recently remembered this article published in The Chronicle of Higher Ed a few years ago. It speaks volumes about some pros and cons (mostly pros) of using technologies like Twitter, online office hours, video chat, etc. to connect to super-sized classes. Though I do not have personal experience in teaching courses with this many students, I still think this teacher has found a way to utilize modern technologies to connect to students in new and important ways. He has taken what many of us would consider a nightmare classroom situation (teaching over 2000 students!) and made it into a classroom experience like no other. If you read through the comments, you'll see that his former students say he has changed their lives and that his was the best class they've ever taken. It's amazing to me that he is/was able to create personal connections with so many students using technology. Basically, if this guy can do it with 2,000+ students, then many of us should strongly consider how we might benefit from these technologies in our own hybrid courses.

I think creating a blended course for language teachers (in my case English) is a real challenge, especially when you have to decide the moment to do speaking practice (online) or (F2f). This resource gives you among other things, a guide to create language learning blended courses. Suuper cool! for EFL(English as a foreign language) teachers.

Thanks Margarita! I am also a Foreign Language Teaching and this information is very useful for me!

Tanks! A great resource.

A majority of the time when hybrid/blended learning courses are created, they also incorporate a "flipped classroom" approach. This approach includes having online lectures done outside of the classroom prior to class and using in-class time for active hands-on application that extends learning. To help clarify what is expected prior to class and what is expected after the face-to-face session having separate objectives as stated in this article is a good best practice.

Online course/modules following Dee Fink's Significant Learning Experience

I have been using Fink for the past two years. My favorite are the charts---it helps the faculty I work with organize their thoughts.

Even though this MOOC is based on Hybrid/ Blended courses, it is still important that the instructor/teacher engage in the learning in and out of the classroom. Here is some ways to do this...

This is an interesting auto ethnographic study of online learning - strikes me as a parallel method to the one Kelvin Thompson explores in his thesis: http://onlinecoursecriticism.blogspot.com.au/2005/08/overview-of-online-course-criticism.html

7 learning design principles that can help anyone make smart decisions when designing and creating online learning courses

Interesting to think about leveraging our "localness". This is part of broader research from Sloan that posits that local universities and colleges can leverage their local brand when they establish quality online or blended courses. Not everyone is going to do the MOOC at Harvard just because it is being offered by a big name university. They may well go with a trusted local brand particularly if we offer a blend of online and personalised experience.

This is my Board "Learning and Education 2.0" on Pinterest. It has pins on various information, articles, links on Online Education, Online courses, MOOCs, etc.

Is your Learning Management System paradigm teacher- or student-centered? Long-term success depends upon the correct answer. Many educators now accept the need to provide course materials online in a Learning Management System (LMS) or Online Learning Environment (OLE) for blended learning to occur successfully.

An ambitious project being funded by the EU (EU project number 539717-LLP-1-2013-1-IT-GRUNDTVIG-GMP) that is designed to "develop an appropriate quality framework as well as tools to evaluate the quality of Blended Learning." Will be interested to monitor how they come to resolve some of the issues pointed out in the Blendkit2016 material.

Interesting! I was a bit taken aback by the lack of concrete ways to assess online courses from the readings, so this is helpful!

A good resource here. JISCNetskills provides training throughout the UK Higher Ed sector and they have a lot of their course guides online. This gives a very good basic introduction to theories and models of elearning. Some good ideas on sequencing.

Blended or hybrid learning, an instructional delivery mode in which instruction is conducted partly online and partly face-to-face, has emerged as one of the fastest-growing and most successful instructional models to deliver flexible learning options for today's learners. This site I think would serve us instructional designers who, after this MOOC would have to deliver professional development training to our faculty. This, together with the course materials in BlendKit would make for an awesome PD experience.

Since we were talking about communication last week, I liked reading this study. Students like ways to interact with each other online as well as in class; and faculty should communicate in a timely manner and give good feedback to students.

Recordings of 60 one-hour sessions from the 2/10 to 2/21 Transforming the Teaching & Learning Environment: the PASSHE Virtual Conference. Many recorded sessions (click 2014 Sessions-by-Date) focus on teaching/designing online/hybrid courses. The virtual conference uses Blackboard Collaborate so you may need to allow the download and running of a .jnlp file.