Practitioner’s task design considerations and choices for blended mode large language classes

Abstract

In recent years there have been works on developing generic and reusable frameworks, or design patterns and pattern language to facilitate learning designs. No doubt such works have contributed tremendously to the reusing and sharing of useful learning designs and improve their transferability to other similar contexts. However, even though such high or medium-level descriptions of learning designs provide useful guidelines and models for practitioners to source and reapply into their unique contexts, decisions of which designs to employ, for what kinds of learner, and in which educational contexts remain complex design decisions to make for practitioners everyday. The appearance of learning technologists in many higher education institutions with the aim to assist the teaching staff in learning design may ease some of the contextualisation and localisation issues, especially for a fully online course, but in blended-learning environments, the face-to-face classroom contexts are inaccessible to anyone but the teaching staff themselves. Thus there is a need to explore and document the common considerations made by such practitioners teaching in a blended mode and the design constraints for them. The paper intends to documents the experiential knowledge of design by the practitioner at such ground level.