Educause and UCF Launching Blended Learning MOOC

Educause is teaming up with the University of Central Florida to offer a free massive open online course on Instructure's Canvas Network. The first MOOC for Educause, "BlendKit2014 - Becoming a Blended Learning Designer" will cover the merits and methods of blended learning, providing an introduction to key issues and step-by-step guidance in producing materials for a blended course. Participants, expected to be mostly educators and instructional designers, will come away with best practices for developing design documents, content pages and peer review feedback tools, according to a press release.

The five-week MOOC was designed by faculty at UCF. The university laid the groundwork for the course in 2011 when it partnered with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities to create a course that would make blended learning available to more educators. The first two iterations of the course attracted hundreds of participants.

"By offering this course to educators and administrators across the country, we will be able to share the valuable tools, information and methods that we, along with other participants in the course, have developed during the past two decades," noted Tom Cavanagh, associate vice president of distributed learning at UCF, in a prepared statement. "With UCF's extensive experience in blended learning and Educause's national IT leadership, we hope that content and available credentials will be of value to the higher education community."

BlendKit2014 will begin April 21, 2014; registration is open now. For more information, visit the Canvas Network site.

About the Author

Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

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