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Strategy & Practice in Blended Learning

London, September 2003
Report by John Helmer - Editor, Epic Thinking

Strategy & Practice in Blended Learning. Design, Delivery, Management & Support.

I came to this conference with a clear aim in view: to find out what people in training and development currently understand by the term blended learning - and to hear about work that is currently being done. Some war stories, a bit of best practice… maybe an ounce or two of theory - that's what I wanted, and I imagine it's what the other delegates wanted too.

So reading the feedback sheets afterwards was instructive.

Delegates complained that speakers had simply done their standard e-learning presentations with more or less cursory nods in the direction of blended (e.g. 'we left a bit of classroom in there for people who feel more comfortable with that'). To tell the truth, there were times during the conference when I had had to remind myself that it wasn't an e-learning event.

However, it is hardly a reflection on the ability of the conference programmers if the conference they provide reflects a true picture of what is going on (or not going on) at the workface. Judging by this conference, then, little consensus exists as yet about the how or why or what of blended learning, and as far as blended learning approached in a structured and well-thought out way goes - it's early days.

So first, some definitions. According to the various speakers, blended learning is:

• a way to acknowledge the differences in how people learn, and embrace those differences - Connor Shaw, Oracle
• about mixing the most appropriate tools for the learning objectives - Karen Murphy, Bayer
• about providing all the content in all the different channels (though the goal of the programme, as well as the content life cycle, should influence the selection of channels) - Don Morrison
• mainly about cracking the business of learner support: if you can crack that you'll crack most of the other bits; because whatever combination of channels you use, people need to work together - Gilly Salmon, OU
• a complex undertaking that involves understanding all the technologies ever invented that can deliver learning, from the invention of writing onwards, and how best to deploy them - Adrian Snook, The Training Foundation
• what we all do nowadays, only the percentages we do it in vary - Paul Bacsisch, UkeU
• something that should apply just as much to the way we evaluate as to the way we instruct - Bill Friel, Scottish Executive

There is certainly enough diversity of opinion here to provoke lively debate! And despite all that has been said above, there was the sense of this conference being a valuable collaborative learning experience.

As a group, we started with some quite ill-formed and unsophisticated views about blended learning. A lot of lip service was played in early presentations, for instance, to Honey & Mumford learning styles providing an aid to channel selection (despite the fact that Peter Honey himself has now backed away from the concept and downplays their importance in favour of personality types).

By the end of the two days, however, there was evidence of delegates looking beyond such industry mantras and arriving at a more sophisticated view of the challenges involved.

Selected presentations follow:

Karen Murphy: the buddy in the blend
Don Morrison: all the colours, all the sizes...
Gilly Salmon: it's collaboration, stupid!
Adrian Snook: skill up for blended
Michelle Selinger: localising e-learning in the classroom
Paul Bacsich: where the numbers bite
Conclusions

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Karen Murphy: the buddy in the blend

The most interesting of three presentations from Bayer at the conference was Karen Murphy's, on a blended learning pilot in which an off-the-shelf systems training package was supported by telephone mentors or 'buddies'.

40% of Bayer's training budget, previously, was spent on travel and overnight accommodation, so the business case for e-learning was definitely there from a cost-cutting point of view. However it was also important to the company, given the investment involved, to prove that learning had actually taken place. An important part of the pilot therefore was evaluation, using video interviews with various stakeholders in marketing, IT and the finance department.

The video interviews provided qualitative research information that went beyond initial reactions to and experiences of the e-learning to probe application in the workplace of what had actually been learned. The bevy of edited clips we were shown did a good job of painting a successful picture of results. The marketing person, for instance, learned to write macros that saved him half an hour each day on a routine administrative task.

In their different ways, interviewees were highly positive about the telephone mentoring, which helped keep motivation up, reduce techno-frustration, and helped them target their learning on things that would help them in their daily work. It was thought helpful that an initial classroom session had been held in which the learners each got to meet the person who would be mentoring them. The whole experience was made less intimidating for the learners through means of this human interaction, offered through a familiar medium, the telephone.

The video interviews certainly sold the successes of the programme, though one couldn't escape the feeling that results were being marketed rather than scientifically assessed through this means… which led to some interesting reflections.

Firstly that Karen Murphy, whose background is in IT training, is seeing her role change to have much more to do with sales and marketing - and the product that she is marketing hard within her organisation (as well as externally) right now is blended learning. This seems to be a general trend in training departments, if the presentations at this conference are anything to judge by.

Secondly, that there are two types of pilots:

· One that is carried out with a view to testing a given course of action, gathering evidence both pro and anti with the aim that a judgement will then be made about whether or not to proceed to roll-out
· A second type that is undertaken when a company has already decided on the course of action in question, and wants to learn what important mistakes to avoid on rollout, also gathering positive evidence (testimonials, etc.) that can be used to market the idea throughout the organisation

The first seems almost doomed to failure, since no-one can work that hard to make the thing succeed without risking skewing the evaluation. My guess is that the Bayer pilot was of the latter kind. At some stage, a leap of faith in something like blended learning is required, and it was interesting to see, at this event, the extent to which that leap has already been made by the training and development community.

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Don Morrison: all the colours, all the sizes...

Don Morrison is definitely in the guru space. Gurus tend to thrive in new, 'green field' areas such as blended learning, but attendant dangers lurk - not least of which is the emergent and ill-defined nature of the subject area. The guru, as a prop to his positioning, needs a status quo to argue against - a consensus view against which to vent his messianic spleen. Nothing like this can really be claimed to exist in blended learning, so there is bound to be a certain amount of tilting at windmills.

The particular Aunt Sally Morrison set up to knock down at the start of a very combatative, uppercase presentation, was the argument that content should determine channel selection (not even Epic, a very content-centred company, is arguing this, so I wondered exactly who it was that was getting his goat).

We all do blended business, he argued - using telephone, letter, fax, email, etc. etc. to communicate - but we don't make our choice of medium depending on the content each has to carry.

In response, he offered the concept of 'content parity', which proved to be an extremely easy position to argue against, not least by those who have to sign the cheques. Because content parity seems to imply 'all the colours in all the sizes'; that the same content should be made available to learners in all delivery channels. Learners can then choose for themselves which combination of channels best suits their own circumstances and preferences.

In this model, the content remains the same, whatever 'modality' you are operating in. Redundancy (in the sense of overlap) is a good thing, because it will widen your take-up among learners. The draw-back, of course, is that any SOI (savings on investment) immediately disappear over the horizon - such an approach, taken to its logical extreme, becomes prohibitively expensive.

However, in practically the same breath, Morrison is talking about criteria for channel selection, so clearly there is some acknowledgement that budgets are finite. All content has a lifecycle, he argues, and where it is in that lifecycle will impact on channel selection. I take this to mean that, for instance, what we go to a conference to hear today, others will be reading in a book (at far less cost) in two years time - and that e-learning might have a different place in the content life-cycle from, say, workbooks.

Morrison made many useful points spinning off from this argument, including these:
· Channel selection should be the business of instructional designers
· Content that is expensive to develop is usually cheap to deliver - and vice versa
· It is an urban myth that changing attitudes can only be done face-to-face - what about books, which have been successfully changing minds throughout recorded history (so surely e-learning can do as much if not more)?
· A distinction needs to be drawn between information architecture (how information is ordered in a system) and information design (how information is apprehended and processed by the learner) - 'doctrinaire' approaches tend to confuse the two

Morrison also brought sophistication to the debate about learning styles, an idea which he said was being applied in a doctrinaire way never intended by its authors. Learners, he said, need to adopt all styles at different times.

One negative point. Gurus tend to speak through paradoxes and statements which on the face of it, seem absurd but which often carry a deeper truth. However, one central statement of Morrison's - 'you have to think about everything' - I'm afraid was patently absurd. No one has the time or resources to think about everything. Life is about choices and trade offs.

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Gilly Salmon: it's collaboration, stupid!

Gilly Salmon is fast achieving guru status herself, in the field of online learner support - largely by dint of her long experience in remote mentoring with the OU ('I pre-date the internet,' she says - 'I even pre-date Windows!') and the wealth of practical advice she has to give on the subject.

Her five-step model for taking cohorts of learners through online programmes collaboratively provided an interesting contrast with the Bayer model of more one-on-one coaching.

We have reviewed this model elsewhere on the Epic website - what is interesting from the point of view of this report, however, is Salmon's insistence on the centrality of the learner support element in a blended campaign: 'if you crack this bit, you'll crack a lot of the other bits', and her reflections on 'synchronous' (or real-time) forms of collaboration/tutoring: 'we haven't found that it offers the reflection and deep learning that we are looking for'.

On learning styles, she says that it is clear that different personality types and learning styles manifest themselves online, and she teaches her e-moderators to spot them as a diagnostic aid to better supporting the learners - however, there is no evidence that these impact significantly on relative performance in the online medium.

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Adrian Snook: skill up for blended

Snook's presentation centred on the skills necessary within training departments to deploy blended learning.

Among other interesting reflections, he highlighted the nature of the transition needed to be made by learning professionals by contrasting the different models of e-learning content production and publishing workbooks.

Print publishing has a relatively low cost of content origination and a high cost of delivery - i.e. the numbers only really start ratcheting up once the presses start rolling.

With e-learning content production this dynamic is reversed - the costs are front loaded to a much greater degree, with the relatively low cost of replication meaning that it is cheaper to deliver, especially at scale.

This dynamic, which also holds true for classroom training (cheap to originate, expensive to deliver) means that it is far more important to get e-learning right first time.

Look, then, at how training budgets get spent. Traditionally, a lump of money is allocated at the beginning of the year, which is then spent bit by bit. An e-learning investment could mean committing, say, a quarter of that annual budget in one lump. This leads to a higher level of risk in decision-making, and throws a greater emphasis on getting the business case right (along with all those tricky RoI calculations) and evaluating effectively.

As a result, people with formal training qualifications are of strategic importance in organisations nowadays, but they don't do much training. Their expertise is focussed on directing, rather than delivering training - on business cases, evaluation and marketing the solution internally.

Blended learning has added yet another layer of complexity to RoI calculations, given an expanded number of learning channels, each of which will impact differently on the cost of a programme - and a potentially infinite number of ways in which to configure them in a blended programme. Control of a learning budget now means having ultimate control of channel selection, which involves knowledge of a wide range of learning media and also (as Don Morrison pointed out earlier) expertise in instructional design…

Of course, external experts can potentially take the burden off here (nobody can really be expected to think about everything) but managing those external experts has its own stresses and strains. An over-reliance on external experts, if you don't have the expertise in-house to evaluate what comes back, is good for neither party.

So Snook's presentation left an important question hanging in the air: does the training and development profession, as it currently exists, have the requisite skills to manage blended learning?

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Michelle Selinger: localising e-learning in the classroom

Michelle Selinger, whose background is also OU, offered a case study from one of the biggest e-learning programmes in the world, a blended programme on a truly global scale, that used e-learning to impart technical product knowledge of data-cabling and wireless networks to Cisco's learners in 280 countries.

Although web-delivered, the programme was actually instructor-led. In other words, the e-learning content was used as classroom materials to be facilitated (and adapted for the local audience) by local tutors. If there were any particular reasons, financial or political, for doing it this way, they did not come across in the presentation and the subsequent Q&A.

Perhaps not surprisingly, problems were encountered. By Selinger's own admission, good teaching practice 'went out of the window' in such a situation, and train-the-trainer work was needed to focus on mediating between the learners in the classroom and what was on the screen. This was complicated by the fact that significant cultural differences exist in the styles and protocols of classroom teaching in each country.

The project thus became an exercise in the localisation of face-to-face instruction. The problems seemed, if anything, greater than those encountered when localising e-learning content for global audiences. E-learning is, in a sense, equally new to every learner, whereas many entrenched cultural assumptions attend a face-to-face event:

• In South Africa learners needed mere background information, the average student having a more limited educational experience - also learners were not used to reading on screen
• French instructors tended to prepare more thoroughly than in other countries
• Swedes were more used to self-directed learning
• Students in the UK expected more instructor intervention
• Poles have a rote-learning culture, preferred practicalities and were more driven by qualifications
• Middle eastern countries, with a strongly oral culture, preferred more class discussion

Interestingly, Selinger's point that students in Dubai seemed to enjoy more class discussion was challenged by a delegate from that country, who said this varied across gender: typically, men would discuss less than women!

Over all, it could be argued that it would have been simpler to localise the content and focus the face-to-face effort on learner support in more of a coaching mode. This was certainly the view taken by a delegate I talked to later from one of the major localisation companies (perhaps not surprisingly).

However, not knowing the fullset of reasons for pursuing this route, one can only assume that necessity was the driver. The presentation certainly gave food for thought in the complexities of localisation with a global blended programme.

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Paul Bacsich: where the numbers bite

Earlier, when considering the changing role of the learning professional, we saw how important return on investment (ROI) calculations are becoming in training roles.

Paul Bascisch has considerable experience in this area through his work at Sheffield Hallam University on evaluation. In particular, he undertook a JISC-funded study on 'the cost of networked learning' which required him to read everything ever written on the costs of e-training.

The good news, we learned, is that the promised cost savings associated with e-learning are real, especially through savings in travel costs and the opportunity cost of having staff out of the office for days at a time. Bacsisch quoted 15-60% gains in improved quality of training by online methods.

He also introduced us to the concept of 'time of the third kind'.

T3 is the entry point for mobile learning (as discussed in the Epic white paper 'M-learning').

The bad news is that the traditional spreadsheet-driven financial model is defective ('sorry boys and girls, it's broken'). To produce robust ROI arguments he suggested we look at stakeholders and use Activity-Based Costing in our approach to course life cycle issues.

Paul's waspish humour, though it evidently confused some, certainly kept the presentation lively. It would be a shame not to capture a few of the asides he dropped along the way:

• One of the principal reasons for the OU's success is that it was not a pure-play distance learning operation, but blended different delivery channels
• Managers are always trying to lose costs: home learning - where the trainee uses their home computer, own electricity and bandwidth, etc. - allows employers to 'export' systems costs
• It is difficult to talk about saving time in Higher Education, where the value of a degree is measured in learning hours
• Since he started work for UkeU 6 months ago Paul has had three different jobs - and his aunt thinks he must be in MI5, because he can't tell her what he does, and he travels around the world a lot!

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Conclusions

There is a benefit in knowing in advance the precise scale of a given challenge that confronts you - even if what you discover is that the challenge is ten times more daunting than you initially supposed.

For a long time it seemed that blended learning offered the answer to the challenge e-learning seemed to pose to the traditional way of doing things. Simple: we just combine bits of the new with those bits of the old that we like and hey presto.

In reality, there is very little hey presto about it. Blended learning involves a whole fresh set of challenges: new understandings are needed, new skill sets, new attitudes - possibly even new people!

But at last it seems, some flesh is being put on the bones of what has for too long been a rather abstract idea.