U Central Florida Updates Blended Learning MOOC
The University
of Central Florida (UCF) and Educause have partnered on the fourth version of a massive open online course
(MOOC) on blended learning.
The
course titled "BlendKit2016: Becoming a
Blended Learning Designer" will be available starting in late
February. The
university and the nonprofit will jointly offer the free course and
Instructure will provide access to it via its Canvas online learning platform.
The
course is intended to help educators as they
create their own courses that include a combination of face-to-face and
online
learning experiences. BlendKit2016 will be facilitated by designers
Rohan
Jowallah and Baiyun Chen from the UCF Center for Distributed Learning.
"As
a practice, online instruction is still in
its infancy, relative to traditional classroom methods," said UCF
Associate
Vice President of Distributed Learning Tom Cavanagh. "Having two
decades of
experience in online learning puts our institution in a unique position
to help
our peers avoid the pitfalls we've experienced with it and fully
realize their
visions for novel modes in interaction."
The
MOOC is the result of a Next Generation
Learning Challenges grant that UCF received in 2011 to create free,
open
resources that would help educators develop their own blended-learning
initiatives.
"The
power of online professional development is
that we can collaborate and educate in real time," said Julie Little,
Educause
vice president of teaching, learning and professional development.
While
the course is free, a more rigorous option
is available for a small cost that will lead to a certificate and a
digital
badge from Educause and UCF. Organizations that want to include
multiple
faculty members can receive custom coaching and, for the first time,
continuing
education units will be offered this year.
The
five-week course will include:
- Expert
and peer assessment of design work;
- Interactions
with facilitators;
- Blogging
and social networking interaction;
- Weekly
webinars with guest presenters;
- Document
templates and "how to" guides;
- Readings
from scholarly works; and
- Suggested
group activities.
Registration
is currently open for the course, which begins February 22.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.