Blended Learning is one of those modern phrases that, like many, have a different meaning depending from where you view it. For instance, “Blended Learning” from the commercial side means one thing while from the academic perspective means something slightly different. No matter how you view blended learning, it serves one purpose: a better trained/educated person.
Blended Learning: The Commercial Definition
In the professional training industry, blended learning is a common and well understood term. It refers to a mix of training that includes the traditional classroom learning interspersed with online, self-paced training, usually delivered via the web. Classroom training is often kept to a minimum for reasons of maintaining learners' productive time by minimizing travel and time away from their desks. As a result, more and more companies are relying heavily on the “e-learning” portion of blended learning to fill in the education gaps.
Individual components of blended learning are delivered in a sequential fashion and in “fits and starts” as opposed to continuous training. This, of course, is due to the valid need on the part of the employer of keeping that individual billable as much as possible.
Blended Learning: An Academic Application
Students are essentially “employed” to learn as much as they can about their chosen career discipline by staying engaged in the process of learning. To be successful, students must learn not only the concepts and theory as taught to them during their regular classes, but also become proficient with the tools a prospective employer uses on a daily basis.
The problem is, professors are required to cover more topics as additional “core” graduation requirements are added with some disciplines having to reduce graduation hour requirements. As a result, professors focus on the concepts and theories of design leaving the student to generally “learn it on their own” when it comes to the technologies actually used by their future employers. It is up to the students to learn it on their own or worse, wait until they graduate.
Bentley’s view of academic blended learning provides an additional source of learning focused entirely on teaching the technology using a combination of hands-on training and video lectures. These online courses are often taken when the students want to take them with 24/7 availability. The courses students take online are closely interlinked to the courses they are currently taking at the university.
One unique aspect of blended technology learning as delivered by Bentley is the fact that because all the learning is presented to the students under the guidance of the Bentley LEARN Server, the system tracks their progress and is recorded on a permanent transcript. This means that a professor can assign “homework” in the form of an online course then request a weekly status report on their students’ progress (or lack thereof).
Blended learning is not limited to only the large time intensive courses, such as the 24 hour-long “MicroStation Essentials” course, but also encompasses the one hour or less streaming video lectures delivered and tracked via the Bentley LEARN Server’s videos. The training is essentially segmented into smaller pieces that are pertinent to the topic of interest.
Finally for ABET Accreditations, blended learning strengthens the ability to provide metrics on a program’s learning progress.
In conclusion, blended learning is another powerful way of learning both the engineering theory taught by professors/instructors and related technology using Bentley LEARN. Blended learning affords graduates the best possible way to prepare them for exciting and rewarding careers in their chosen professions.