I have been reading over the NGLC Blended Tool Kit Materials and am looking forward to designing my course and assisting SUNY Brockport faculty, using this method. I am the Instructional Designer at SUNY Brockport and have been working with faculty on developing their online and blended courses. So far, we haven't set any designated training for blended learning and I found it reassuring that the Educause material and first reading in the Blended Tool kit suggests the training for both online and blended is similar.
For the purposes of this blog, I would like to approach this Blended training from a Media Ecologist perspective. Loosely defined, media ecology is the study of humans, values, and cultures in relationship to media communication technologies. As communications technologies have progressed into interactive social media forums, online courses strive to create a social environment for student..to keep human interaction at the center of learning. Blended has the face-to-face element, but I would like to discuss extending social interaction in the online portion of the courses for student engagement and multimodal learning.
Thoughts?
