24 Starting to Plan your First Lesson

Now that we have our definition of blended learning and have reviewed the principles important to consider when planning a blended-learning course, it is time to start planning your lesson!

When starting to plan a lesson, you will need to think about who your participants are, what you hope they will be able to do by the end of the lesson, and what portions of the lesson will best be completed online and in-person. This type of analysis is necessary to help you design a great lesson which will meet both your needs and the needs of your students.

As we have been learning, some of the ways the online portion of the lesson can be used include:

• Bridging or connecting the topic to a student’s own experience or their own motivation for learning about the topic.
• Preparation, through readings, video lectures, discussions, and reflective practices, for the in-person activities.
• Problem solving, perhaps through the use of student teams that work through a problem related to the topic either before or after an in-person session.
• Providing multiple ways for students to access course material to support different learning styles and to review  course material at the students own pace.
• Providing a place for students to ask questions and get clarification.

The in-class portion of the lesson can be used for these purposes as well. In some courses, instructors use the in-person time to discuss and clarify the most important parts of the lesson. In others, instructors are focusing on community building – connecting with students and connecting students with each other. How you divide the online and in-person activities will depend on your students, your topic, and on your own teaching preferences. There isn’t one right answer here. In fact, the joy of the blended-learning mode is that there is a broader set of answers available to you!

In An Introduction to Hybrid Teaching, while recognizing that most activities can be adapted to either environments, the authors list activities that are most suited for the online and in-person environments:

In-Person is good for:

• Establishing social presence and support
• Nonverbal communication
• Defining assignments
• Negotiating expectations and responsibilities
• Diagnosing students’ conceptual problems and providing immediate feedback
• Brainstorming
• Role play
• Student demonstration of psychomotor skills

Online is good for:

• Sustaining group cohesion, collaboration, and support
• Reflective, on-task discourse
• Broader participation in discussions
• Critical analysis
• Self-paced learning and practice
• Self-assessment quizzes with feedback
• Automatic grading of multiple choice, T/F, fill-in-the-blank tests
• Creating a content outline, chunking content into modules

For your lesson in this FLO course, the majority of the online portion will need to be delivered prior to the in-person session. While the online portion will be set up in a discussion post, it does not need to be a ‘discussion.’ Feel free to use that space to provide and use any resources, links, and other external tools in support of your lesson.

Also, for this course, be sure that:

• The online portion of your lesson takes no more than 20 minutes for participants to complete.
• The in-person portion is approximately, without being longer than, 10 minutes.