The Blended Learning Bandwagon

How elements of distance education are counter-productive
to some language learning environments.

Find an issue in educational technology these days more hyped than "blended learning." A challenging assignment.

Blended learning, with its delicious allusion to those over-priced energy smoothies at the gym and its more utilitarian yet hip sounding hybrid learning, with its allusion to being green, represent the use of some elements of distance education (DE) technology in a traditional class, that is, one that meets together in the same physical space. The most common element of DE to incorporate is computer mediated communication (CMC), taking the form of either a synchronous chat (like IM) or an asynchronous discussion board, where students post messages around a topic (threaded discussions) and responses to the posts of others.

The CMC options in the virtual space of Blackboard courseware.


Student authoring of more elaborately formatted input, including embedded multimedia, may more effectively employ a class wiki or blog (see previous post, The Thinking Person's Wiki). Discussion boards, wikis, or blogs represent the virtual classroom space vs. the physical space of face-to-face interaction.


A pedagogical not technical challenge

Creating this stew of virtual and physical elements for a class, blending ingredients that cook at different rates, makes the task of teaching far more complicated, although potentially more interesting and effective. We are only beginning to address the plethora of skills needed to design and conduct such blended learning courses. What either intimidates or excites teachers initially, and the skills many focus on, however, involve the mechanics of using courseware rather than sound pedagogy and instructional design. The irony of this oversight seems to occur to too few educators.

Language courses present additional challenges to justifying the blended proposition. Teachers have to evaluate what is sacrificed, because, ultimately, in a zero-sum game, hybrid learning is about trade-offs—what's sacrificed for what's gained. The true measure is not merely what's added but the net gain. Class time and time available to students to study outside of class are finite and more-or-less fixed at a ratio determined by credit hours. The challenge, therefore, is to find the most effective use of this given time.


Why they're here and not there

Holed up in their dorm rooms alone, back lit by a blinking cursor, is not something SL students need to travel to another country to experience.

A second language class is a different animal from most other courses on campus. It seems sometimes that no one on campus realizes this (including, sadly, a few of those SL teachers). In a second language learning environment, especially where students live in the target language country temporarily (i.e., not immigrants), the key ingredient to acquiring communicative competency (the principle objective of living amidst the TL) is authentic communicative interaction. The post-behaviorist SL teacher creates an environment where students need to interact with each other to accomplish authentic tasks, ones that in some way intersect with their interests or needs with a deliberate though not necessarily overt focus on form.1 These teachers give students, in other words, what they can't get back home. Holed up in their dorm rooms alone, back lit by a blinking cursor, is not something SL students need to travel to another country (at great expense, by the way) to experience.

They'd be far better served, linguistically and culturally, spending their time outside of class on a ball field, in a mall, at a party, in a bar or a church, anywhere, as long as the environment demands authentic interactions to put into practice what they're studying in class. Thus, spending significant amounts of time performing DE tasks, as with working with drill-and-kill tutorial CALL software (see previous post), fails to make the best use of an SL student's limited time in the TL environment. SL students would be best served maximizing their real not virtual interactions.

Teaching writing presents a genuine opportunity for blended learning or DE as an effective device and not merely an opportunity for a teacher to dabble in technology because it's there. The needs of process writing can be addressed textually with comments on exchanged drafts, such as with Microsoft Word's Comments and Track Changes features, also supported in limited fashion in more collaborative environments, such as Google Docs, Adobe's Buzzword, or wikis (all free and less buggy than MS locally installed applications).

Entering comments in the collaborative Google Docs space.


Teacher feedback on student writing can very effectively be accomplished through virtual rather than physical interaction—something that started long before computer-based DE (think correspondence course). There's little debate about this among language teachers. Still, is this what SL learners should be spending their time on, given what is generally a brief stay in the TL country to study? Probably not, unless these students are also preparing to enter an academic degree program in the country or score well on writing tests for other purposes.

And so we return to a consideration of net gain in adopting one learning approach over another. What do students gain from spending more time in interactions in a virtual space vs. interactions in a physical space? It's been demonstrated by educators studying input in online chats, for example, that shy students who contribute little in a physical class—whether for reasons stemming from culture, personality, or lower language proficiency—may compensate for this deficiency in an online environment with significant input. In fact, such students may shine online, seemingly finding an appropriate outlet for their otherwise pent-up ability or desire to contribute. Such scenarios are widely seen as benefits to online interaction. Nonetheless, such benefits may accrue to only a small number of students in a class, where others may shine in physical rather than virtual environments.

In sum, the justifications for a low-fat blended learning concoction in a SL environment:

1. To bring quiet students out of their shells,
2. To facilitate process writing.

But perhaps the greatest justification for blended learning, if not a pure DE course:

3. To create a learning environment when a physical meeting is not possible for logistical reasons.

There are many reasons why it may be impossible or impractical for a class to meet physically, as this may occasionally be the case in a traditional course due to inclement weather, teacher or student illness, travel commitments, etc. The caution against the use of virtual space interactions at the expense of face-to-face interactions does not discount the use of blended learning or DE as a remedy for logistical issues. 

But we need to be careful about seeing our SL class as a laboratory to experiment with blended learning, even if everyone else seems to be doing it. As an instructional designer friend, John M., suggested to me recently over a pint, teachers should, at the very least, have to learn something themselves via DE before they employ these tools in their own classes, either in whole or in part. 



1. See Chapelle, C. (2001). Computer applications in second language acquisition: Foundations for teaching, testing and research. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.