Presenting information to students the right way can be the key to achieving learning outcomes. Below are some strategies to employ with blended learning.
Students must become personally invested in curriculum. If they don’t see the point of what we ask them to do, they’re less likely to do it. When incorporating blended learning it’s important to offer relevant work to students. The projects they do must connect to their interests and have a meaningful purpose. Creating solutions for real-world problems is a good example of this.
Also, we must create relevance from the very beginning. Explaining relevance after the fact doesn’t help the student or the instructor. It can also slow down the learning process.
Students do things on their own, with their teacher, and with other students in class. Each one of these requires a different set of skills. The opportunity to socialize and share ideas with others matters more than you know. Students need one-and-one and private learning time just as much. A healthy mixture of these things helps students get as much interaction and information as possible.
Learning on-the-go is vital to the success of most blended learning classes. When an instructor doesn’t provide students with mobile learning tools, it’s very hard for those students to get the information they need to complete their work. By offering mobile tools, more can be accomplished no matter where the student is at the time.
In blended learning, much of the work completed online is reinforcement of what students learn in the classroom. If the student doesn’t need that work, he or she shouldn’t have to complete it. Some students grasp concepts faster than others. Being open to this can help all students learn and retain information more easily.
To keep students interested, they need to be agents of their own learning. Without goals, they are just passive learners. They are being given information that may or may not factor into what is important to them. Keep them engaged by helping them set goals that work with their interests and the knowledge they need.
The instructions have to be clear for students. The content the student is working through must also be so.
Students can tell when something is authentic. They’ll respond to it much better than to other options. They can also tell when they’re being challenged for a good reason. They know when they’re just being given something to do that’s difficult but lacks substance. Great blended learning ideas include combining authenticity with a challenge. In this way, students will have a much better response to it.