A Continuum of Blended and Online Learning


Article de revue

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État de publication: Publiée (2020 Décembre )

Nom de la revue: Revue canadienne sur l'avancement des connaissances en enseignement et en apprentissage / Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Volume: 11

Numéro: 3

Intervalle de pages: 9

URL: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/cjsotl_rcacea/article/view/13420/11079

Résumé: In the last three decades, information and communications technology (ICT) have evolved very rapidly. Among other things, it resulted in new opportunities in course delivery modes: Online and blended courses (Siemens et al., 2015). A course delivery mode refers to the decisions about the way teaching, learning, and assessment activities are conveyed to students. Thanks to ICT, these delivery modes offer advantages both to students and to postsecondary institutions. On the one hand, depending on their design, blended and online courses have the potential to meet the demands of students who desire flexible course schedules, such as adult students, because of family and/or work responsibilities (Lakhal, 2019). They also give students better access to higher education,especially in large countries such as Canada where distances can be quite significant between students’ homes and their colleges or universities (Lakhal et al., 2020), and they allow both synchronous and asynchronous contacts between students and with the instructor, even if students would not need to travel as much to attend face-to-face sessions (Cidral et al., 2018). On the other hand, online and blended courses provide colleges and universities with some financial benefits (Gosmire et al., 2013), as they can free up space on campuses, since students and instructors no longer have to meet face-to-face in a classroom for each class session. Moreover, as some meta-analyses (Bernard et al., 2004, 2014; Means et al., 2013) have revealed, blended and online courses appear to be at least as effective for student learning as face-to-face courses delivered on campus.

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