Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google


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].

Featured

  • circuit patterns

    Anthropic Launches Lower-Cost Claude Sonnet 5

    Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 5, positioning the model as its most autonomous mid-tier offering to date and a lower-cost alternative to its flagship Opus 4.8 system. The company said the model can plan multi-step tasks, operate tools such as browsers and terminals, and complete agentic work at a level that previously required larger and more expensive models.

  • Digital cyberspace with particles and Digital data

    Report: AI Is Moving Faster than Data Trust

    AI agents are already in use or pilot at most organizations, but data visibility, governance and precision recovery capabilities have not kept pace, according to Veeam's new Data & AI Trust Gap report.

  • large cloud icon on the right in an abstract world above a polygon with a dark blue background

    Cloud Security Alliance Expands Focus on Governance and Assurance for Agentic AI Systems

    The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) recently announced a series of CSAI Foundation milestones aimed at securing what it calls the agentic control plane, including a new catastrophic risk initiative, CVE Numbering Authority authorization, and the acquisition of two agentic AI specifications.

  • Human Hand Assembling Digital Data Blocks

    Report: AI Impact Starts with Strong Data Foundation

    High-impact AI implementations are more likely to treat data architecture, governance, and operationalization as strategic requirements, according to TDWI's 2026 Blueprint report.