We believe there are five key practices in designing blended learning programs that map against the levels of competency and learning timeline. The first of these is Discovery: Becoming familiar with key concepts, vocabulary, and procedures. This is part of the basic knowledge level of competency, and can and should be taught during the instructional phase of the blended learning program.
Depending on the content, concepts can be introduced via self-paced instruction, instructor-led training, rich media presentation, or simple background readings. They can also be introduced via one-on-one coaching, but this is inefficient.
More complex instructional designs can provide a pre-work assessment that lets the learner know what areas they do not know, or more creatively raise questions in a learner’s mind by posing scenarios that the learner cannot solve, before providing the content.
In any case, the key take aways are that:
- Disseminating content is only the first step in good instruction (and, honestly, the simplest step)
- There are several ways to do it
- It only addresses learning goals related to knowledge of the subject matter, not skillfulness or proficiency
Future posts in this series will address other key practices.
