Quality Assurance in Blended Learning

Focusing on this week's readings from my blended learning course, many questions need to be not only investigated, but also answered regarding my upcoming development and delivery of blended instructional courses. First, the question of following standardized rules and procedures for creating and instructing blended learning courses exist due to its location within the early stages of a product's life cycle. Second, instructional effectiveness was also questioned and must be addressed. The need for learners to transfer newly gained knowledge to real world applications is a critical issue for developing credibility of blended learning. Finally, a conclusion is offered for perhaps providing insight on how I may resolve issues and questions pertaining to standards and instructional effectiveness for blended learning courses.

In the reading, the lack of a formalized, authoritative body to oversee standards of blended learning was declared and discussed which translates into that the blended learning discipline is in the infantile stage and still evolving. This point was an important concern for me since I have previous experience in researching authority bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers (ICANN), and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) regarding the standardization of internet protocols, web development, and cyber infrastructure. The commonality between all three of these organizations mentioned is that they are formed as nonprofits, but more importantly, tax exempt public charities for the purpose of serving the general public. With this in mind, the formation of a nonprofit organization may be a possible solution for moving forward and developing standardized blended learning course development, best practices, and open source tools which also do not exist, but were mentioned as a major problem within the discipline. Furthermore, the question of efficiency and collaboration may also be resolved if a consortium of organizations networked together to share information and strategies under the helpful hand of a neutral and public serving nonprofit organization for advancing blended learning.

Besides the need for standards and a governing body, instructional effectiveness was a a major point realized from the week's reading. In my attempt to provide effective blended learning courses in real estate science and other disciplines, I plan to develop Google Docs forms for students to submit their feedback. Both formative and summative, student feedback during and after course delivery will be a key component for my instructional development because of their alternative perspectives will render new information outside of my instructional role. The other key component for my continued growth in delivering effective blended courses will be the requesting and collecting of peer review feedback. Peer review feedback may also provide ideal and timely information for improving blended learning course delivery since others may have already encountered the same issues within their courses.

In sum, my approach for developing and delivering blended learning courses covering real estate science will be a consistent, researched approach for helping students build new knowledge. Nevertheless, it is important as an instructor and researcher to stay abreast of the latest scientific research findings concerning blended learning by reading peer reviewed articles found in academic journals. Moreover, I will also pay close attention to other academic instructors' views and methods by perhaps subscribing to mailing lists, joining forums, and attending workshops involving blended learning best practices. Lastly, the academic community within the University of Central Florida will continue to be a main resource for me to lean on as I continue to develop and deliver blended online courses.

--Corey

Understanding Blended Learning

This summer I am enrolled in my second Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) offered by UCF and EDUCAUSE. Blendkit 2014 is the name of the course and my goal for enrolling is to apply blended instructional concepts and principles to the ongoing development of real estate courses I am currently designing. From my past learning and instructional experiences, there seems to be a gap in the effort to develop a hybrid instructional approach in the real estate sector, especially in residential. Salesperson courses tend to be either face-to-face or entirely online. However, applying a blended approach to the delivery of residential salespersons and broker salespersons courses not only seem to be likely ideal course candidates, but ultimately improve learning experiences of pre-licensed students.

After reading the initial chapter assignment, my understanding of what a blended course was confirmed by the definition given that a blended course is comprised of the traditional face-to-face instruction and online instruction. From the stated benefits of blended learning, the most important benefit that registered with me, as a current student myself, was the additional benefit of flexibility. Traditional instruction has been and still is the prime instructional mode for delivering real estate salesperson courses, even though e-Learning instruction is well established in other industries. My theory for this resistance is that the real estate industry is quite often constrained and restricted by older and traditional practitioners as well as instructors which in effect causes not only the adoption of technology to be slower, but also new approaches to implement within the industry. Annual reports routinely state that the average age of the practicing residential salesperson is 55 or older which reaffirms my theory each year.

For better understanding development approaches for blended courses, several interesting points were made within the designing section. In particular, the concept of geographically distributed came up which is an important aspect for my development since future learners will be dispersed through out the state of Florida and eventually nationally. Again, flexible learning was brought up during the planning process of delivery. This is another interesting point for relating to real estate since the delivery of salesperson courses tend to be very deliberate in their linear, systematic approach of instructing towards the exam which is fully endorsed by state real estate commissions. Near the end of the design section, the topic of models or frameworks for developing learning courses was discussed. From my most recent research on interoperability and reusability of learning management systems, ontology development applied to e-Learning is a new research interest of mine and may extend well to the development of a blended real estate course. An ontological approach applied to blended course development may become an effective method for developing dynamic courseware along with a graphical solution for eventually establishing a knowledge base system for future courseware development. In sum, I plan to apply early concepts of blended learning for developing a blended real estate course while using an ontology tool called Protege for testing in Moodle, an open source learning management system.

--Corey