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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2017

Getting to Grips with Blending Master Degree Courses

Résumé

It is an often debated question to know how to achieve a successfully blended course, and, above all, what successful blending means and implies (e.g. Neumeier, 2005, Garrison & Vaughan, 2008, Sagarra & Zapata, 2008, Murphy & Southgate, 2011, McGee & Reis, 2012, Picciano, Dziuban & Graham, 2014, McCarthy, 2016). In the study proposed here, successful blending is construed as the coherent integration of an online and a face-to-face teaching / learning mode, regarding temporal issues, evaluation, objectives and methods, etc. (Nissen, 2014). As part of a re-organization of a Master’s Degree in e-Language-Learning Design at a University in France the program coordinators opted to blend some of the courses, in order to achieve better congruence between the means of delivery and the content and learning aims of these courses. Based on Dewey’s principle of learning by doing (1960), such an approach is meant to enable students to experience different tools, methods and pedagogical scenarios that are potentially relevant to them as future e-learning designers and language teachers or trainers with specific competence in integrating digital media into learning settings. 7 teachers volunteered so far to blend their courses, either through developing a blended course from scratch or through integrating online-tasks and tuition into courses that were formerly exclusively brick-and-mortar. They name various reasons for their participation in addition to those mentioned above, such as better adapting to learner mobility (giving access to online resources and tasks during students’ traineeship period) or to teacher mobility, and providing experience of telecollaboration. The blending of this Master’s degree is a work package within a French national project called ReFlexPro, funded by the ANR (national agency for research in France). As such, introducing flexibility (this is what “Flex” in the project name refers to) is yet another key objective of this blending. While most of the courses are disciplinary courses, the course which is the focus of this study is an L2-course. This course aims at providing students with the necessary skills to communicate and (tele)collaborate in an L2 (here: English) with geographically distant partners, and at the same time to design telecollaborative tasks or task sequences. This study will focus mainly on the L2-course, as compared to the other courses, with the following questions in mind: •Are the objectives set by the blended approach achieved? •Do students and teachers perceive the integration of online-tasks and face-to-face sessions as being coherent? •Which parameters are the identified successes and failures due to? Regarding the third question, the chosen lines of analysis are based on Garrison & Vaughan (2008), Müller-Hartmann & Kurek (2016), Nissen (2014), and O’Dowd & Ritter (2006). In order to answer the three questions, the author will triangulate different types of gathered data: a survey conducted amongst the students, reflective essays, interviews with the teachers, and an analysis of the course design. First results show that this course closely matches students’ needs and interests, but nevertheless needs to allow for more social presence, and to better align telecollaborative and course objectives.

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Education
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Dates et versions

hal-01940809 , version 1 (30-11-2018)

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  • HAL Id : hal-01940809 , version 1

Citer

Elke Nissen. Getting to Grips with Blending Master Degree Courses. Eurocall Conference 2017, Aug 2017, Southampton, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-01940809⟩

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