During the past two years, we had online teaching mostly. We gained a lot of experiences about how to use different tools to make the online teaching suitable for the students.
Now we slowly change back our teaching in classroom. We can improve our teaching by blending different teaching methods or teaching tools, to make our students to be more active and involved in the learning process.
Blended learning:
During our group discussion, we found out there are many definitions about blended learning. For me, the definition of the blended learning can be ajusted according to your own understanding. For me, it is very important to understand why we need to have blended learning, and how we can give a good blended teaching/learning to our students in my courses.
Why?
The learning/teaching should be students’ center style. We should make the students to be active learners instead of passive learners. So we can use different teaching methods to make the students to be engaged in the learning processes, and we can use different methods to get feedback from the students’ learning and adjust our teaching in time.
Different methods in the blended learning
During our group’s discussion, we discussed about different methods in blended learning, and also discuss about social presence (SP), cognitiv presence (CP) and teaching presence (TP).
Method 1: blend online teaching with classroom teaching
For this method, we can use the online tools to get feedback from students’ learning, and discuss in the classroom teaching. There was a colleague use online tool (Mentimeter) to get answers from the students for some questions, and he/she can see which part of lecture the most students have questions about, then he/she can give deeper explanation during the lecture in the classroom.
Method 2: blend synchronous and asynchronous teaching
We have a course ran in this method. The students learn the lectures by watching the recorded films, and work on some questions related to the films. Then we will have classroom discussion section, in which the students can ask questions/helps from the teachers related to the lectures or excesses they need to do. We also have Padlet platform for the students to post their questions, and the teachers will answer the question in Padlet as well. So if the other students have similar questions, then can see the helps from Padlet.
Method 3: blend the teacher’s role with the student’s role (Flipped classroom)
For this method, I discussed with my colleagues. Some of them thinks this method is good. The students can take the teacher’s role to give a lecture about one chapter, they need to understand the chapter very well before they can give the lecture in front of other students.
Some colleagues said they tried to use it for the group work supervision or lab work. First group get supervision and information from the teacher. Then next group work will be supervised by the previous group students. In this case, the previous group students should understand the knowledge of group work or lab work very well, in order to be able to supervise next group.
