Innovative Blended Learning Methods: Hits and Misses

Session Type: Standard Presentation Session (45 minutes) Theme: Technology Enhanced T&L | Beyond the Basics; Good Quality Teaching, Inclusive Teaching, Sophisticated Flexible & Blended Delivery of T&L Failure is the mother of innovation – the key is to be supported so that you want to keep getting back up again. From a distinct multi-disciplinary academic pedagogical community, ideas and experiments sprang for blended learning methods with the key aim to benefit the students. Some ideas flourished, some floundered but all had merit and reasons why they did or did not succeed. This session will consist of two parts: A presentation will showcase some of our successes and failures in applying blended learning methodology from a range of disciplines and angles, as well as share our lived experiences of the emerged challenges. From such varied disciplines as nursing, psychology and chemistry we will share which aspects worked, which did not and what we would do differently to improve the results. • The challenge for nursing focused upon incentivizing student engagement and collaboration through combining internal and distance cohorts in a series of collaborative learning tasks incorporating formative feedback and fostering a geographical dispersed community of learners. • The challenge for chemistry has been the reliance on in-lab instrumentation for the performance of experiments with steps undertaken to replicate the immersive learning experience of on-campus students for those studying by distance online. • The challenge for psychology was to create a transformative experience around interpersonal processes and to foster individual responsibility for learning amongst a first-year cohort through allowing local and distance students to self-manage interactions. In the second part, participants will then work in an interactive document to collaboratively answer a series of questions related to the issues that academics face in pursuing innovative teaching methodology. The goal of the collaborative ideation session is to identify real challenges and begin to tackle these in conversations throughout the conference. By sharing hits, misses and challenges in a supportive setting, participants will engage with each other in an informed collegial manner, thus mimicking the supportive nature of the iScholar group of which the presenters are representing.