Have we lost our sense of purpose with blended learning?
Sometimes it feels as though UK higher education likes creating reports on blended learning just as much as Warner Brother’s liked making Police Academy films. The latest in the franchise is the cross-party think tank Policy Connect's report “Digitally enhanced blended learning”, a title that, with a few more keywords stuffed in, would compel us all to shout “house!”.
This report follows JISCs Beyond Blended report in 2023, the Office for Students (OfS) Blended Learning Review in 2022, and the belle of the ball when it comes to title’s, “Gravity assist: propelling higher education towards a brighter future”, also from the OfS in 2021.
Blended learning, like digital transformation, has been the El Dorado of UK higher education for some time. Strategy-after-strategy, year-after-year, institutions have stressed that the quest to reach this golden city will occupy efforts for the next several years.
However, post-pandemic, it feels as though UK higher education is no longer on an expedition to reach blended learning; it has arrived. To quote the Policy Connect report:
“Blended learning has become the sector standard in higher education, offering a more personalised learning experience designed to meet the evolving demands of the digital age….universities are now delivering, courses that combine in-person and digitally enabled forms of teaching and assessment.”
Not only that, but JISC is now “so over” blended learning because, don’t you know, like, everything is blended now….duh!
“Digital technologies are now thoroughly embedded into learning and teaching as a matter of deliberate investment and policy from HE providers. It is part of an ongoing commitment to developing practice as students adopt technologies to support their studies. This means learning and teaching are always potentially ‘blended’”
All of this begs the question: why are reports and recommendations still being created that convey the sense we’re not where we need to be and we need to do other things, sometimes different and new things, to get there?
What do we really mean?
Well I think there are a few reasons for this. Firstly, I don’t think the sector ever really meant a fundamentally different modality by blended learning. In many cases, I don’t think it knew what it meant other than more digital technology to make things better than they are at the moment please.
For so long, blended learning has fundamentally been a proxy for greater digital technology usage in learning and teaching on UK HE’s core proposition: on-campus residential education. The enforced reliance on digital technology during the pandemic meant widespread adoption of digitally reliant forms of assessment, teaching via video conferencing, and lecturers having to reach for parts of the VLE that were previously unreached. In a way, digital technology usage in UK higher education reached an enforced zenith during that period.
That has confused our measures of progress, making it seems a bit silly to say that UK HE isn’t fundamentally now a blended learning model. When you add to that the vague definitions of blended learning in some of these reports, it’s hard not to agree that everything is blended. You’d need to be some sort of Amish-style university not be classed as “doing” blended learning on those terms.
I think the mistake some of these organisations have made is that they’ve focused on blended learning as an experience rather than a commitment, particularly a location-based commitment. In higher education, we have the campus-based residential experience that requires you to live in close proximity to that campus or within a reasonably commutable distance. Then we have online distance learning, which does not involve a commitment to live close to the campus because you will never need to attend the campus.
As I’ve said previously, I prefer the definition of blended learning that seems more common in the US, which entails a reduction of in-person commitments. I see that as an explicit overarching model and proposition that doesn’t require living in relatively close proximity to the campus but will entail some periods of campus attendance. One imagines that this attendance would be a short burst of consecutive days at different levels of frequency.
So blended learning is not this vague mix of digital and in-person within the confines of the traditional campus-based experience. Rather, it’s a means of taking a HE course without having to relocate or live near to campus, with actual campus attendance being more infrequent and planned. This way of thinking about blended learning seems to make more sense to me because tying it to the use of digital technology in learning and teaching is increasingly a fool's errand.
It’s complicated…
However, I think that’s where we’re at in UK higher education, which can make aspects of these reports frustrating reads. For instance, the JISC report feels as though, in making the point that everything is now blended, they’re peeling the infinite onion. In fairness, they’re not the only ones who have sought to tackle blended learning in an age of digital technology ubiquity, or to put it another way, look at HE learning and teaching through a post-digital lens.
However, some other outputs come across as mangled models that inadvertently put you in a corridor of infinite doors rather than providing clarity and helpful constraints.There are also undoubtedly egos involved here, with people wanting their models to be the ones the sector adopts, and examples of moves to plant flags in blended learning design.
However, I’m not sure that what the sector really needs, in a world of myriad combinations of digital and in-person, is for people to create a laboured treatise that amplifies the complexity of thinking about learning and teaching through the lens of combination. One hopes we can move beyond some of the post-digital navel-gazing and the current UK HE relationship status with blended learning of “it’s complicated.”
Ultimately, I think unless blended learning is really a fundamentally distinct way of engaging with higher education, we should probably not use the term. I’ve seen little that makes me think the blended learning being talked about now is really distinct from the way in which people have talked about utilising digital technology within on-campus teaching and learning for years.
More, bigger, better
This is the reason why we have these types of reports and we’ll continue to see them being published. In a way, we can never stop talking about how we can pump more digital into teaching and learning and how it perpetually has the potential to improve things.
There is also a sense that we need to do this because the world beyond higher education, which we are preparing students for, is inherently digital. No one is going to fundamentally argue against that, but I’m not sure about some of the arguments made in respect to that and blended learning.
A common argument, also made within the Policy Connect report, is that by using digital technologies at university, students “become proficient with the tools and technologies in contemporary workplaces.” This simplistic line of thought gets to the heart of some of the issues I have with the sector’s thinking about digital skills.
Too often, these are thought of as generic skills, divorced from underpinning knowledge, specifics, and contexts. The problems around digital capabilities are as much about how the sector thinks about them in aggregate as they are about the lack of them. Does blended learning in and of itself really address digital skills in a big, meaningful way? I’m not convinced of that or some of the arguments for it.
Ultimately, I think sometimes the sector doesn’t have a thoroughly convincing purpose behind some of the desires around blended learning, or what this is really about, which is the greater use of digital technologies within the on-campus model.
The overarching purpose of the use of digital technology in online distance education is clear. At its heart, it enables access to higher education for those who can’t or won’t access it in the traditional way.
The use of digital technology within learning and teaching in the on-campus model seems at times to be simply a case of more, bigger, better, or vague notions of progress. While digital technologies can help improve the teaching and learning experience, we also have to acknowledge that there is a legacy of examples of failure and frustration.
Going forward, we would do well to develop a much more convincing sense of why we’re doing it, with more convincing ideas to back it up that make it more of a success than simply a perpetual talking point.
