About The Website ”How To Design Blended Learning Courses”
This page provides background information about the website “How to Design Blended Learning Courses”. The site offers a structured, evidence‑based framework that supports university educators in designing meaningful blended learning experiences. It brings together practical tools, modular templates, and research‑informed guidance to help educators apply effective course design principles in diverse academic contexts.
Give assistance to teachers in higher education
The website is meant to assist teachers involved in redesigning their existing courses into effective, efficient, valued, well-liked and feasible blended learning courses.
University policy documents and education ministries worldwide clearly intend to advance and apply modern higher education (MHE) features, such as blended and online learning.
Consequently, university staff across various locations and under differing circumstances will participate or be invited to contribute to implementing blended learning.
The website and the Moodle course focus on preparing good learning processes and learning environment(s) necessary to design modern higher education.
Evidence-based Blended Learning: The website's focus is tailored to two common design situations
The website’s content draws heavily from my book Evidence-based Blended and Online Learning: Course Design for University Teachers. This book encapsulates my experiences as an educational consultant and my role in leading IT implementation programs across six Dutch universities..
The concept for the book emerged due to my observation that three critical elements of course design are frequently not developed in depth:
- Matching design tasks with the experiences of teacher designers.
- Enabling teacher designers to apply available evidence-based pedagogical options.
- Applying research literature on design in the course design and development process.
The website is combined with a Moodle course. In this course, you are supported step-by-step on redesigning your course into a blended learning course. You can follow the Moodle course alone or in a small group with or without the support of an IT pedagogical expert.
The teachers …
- Have a limited number of new ideas they want to implement in the current course;
- Have several new ideas for crucial changes in the pedagogical approach he or she has to design the complete course. The learning environment remains broadly the same;
- Have to restructure their course because of serious problems or wish to develop the concerning subject matter and learning objectives;
- Must restructure their course because of new pedagogical visions, unique learning activities and materials;
- Must design a completely new course: new content, new didactics, new requirements, etcetera.
- In addition to these five design situations, the Basic DD process might be focused on solving wicked problems at the faculty or university level. A wicked problem is difficult to formulate because the people involved can differ strongly on how to tackle it.
The Website describes the main components and the stages of the course design process that may be followed. Some supporting design tools are also presented. The Basic Course Design and Development process stages in my book are adapted to fit the design process for design situations 1 and 2.
