In search of a new iPod

While I was in Texas recently I went in search of an iPod shuffle. The store I was in was huge and the assistant gave me precise instructions as to where I could find one, but still I spent a long frustrating time wandering up and down the aisles while failing to find it. Why? Was I being stupid or was the famed American customer service not all it was cracked up to be?

The answer was simple: I was told to look on the second floor – and an American's second floor is a Brit's first floor.

It got me thinking afterwards about how often we have conversations with people where we know we are talking about the same thing but in fact we each understand something quite different. My field is e-learning – particularly blended learning - and every day I talk to people about it, but are we talking about the same thing?

In this blog I want to spell out exactly what I mean by blended learning: what it is - and what it is not, why it's needed, how it fits in, how it works, what its strengths are, how it can be implemented. When I mean blending I have in mind the 71 separate elements that can be put into the mix. If 71 is a few more than you thought there were, then maybe we are not talking about the same thing . . .

First Steps

When people first 'do' blended learning it is usually in the same way: they look at an existing classroom course and see what could be replaced by e-learning. A 5-day classroom based course becomes a 2-day e-learning section followed by three days in the classroom. Easy isn't it? Easy maybe, but it has about as much in common with blended learning as fitting wheels to a horse turns it into a car.

Stepping back again

Let's go back to the start. And the first thing we'll do is chuck classroom training out the window. Are you shocked? Is that heresy? Of course there is nothing wrong with classroom training as such but its dominance of the training landscape obscures and distorts the possibilities. Like the first step described above we are always dancing around the altar of instructor-led training thinking of ways to replicate the gold standard by alternative means.

Blended learning, real blended learning, doesn't start from this position. It makes no assumptions about the solution before it has looked at the problem. It looks at the task in hand. It looks at the students. It looks at the tools. It looks at the culture. And then it builds a solution focused on the best way to achieve the most effective result.

Tomorrow: in the next post I'll explain why we need to find a new way of doing things.