The importance of reviewing your teaching practice - Blended Learning as an inclusive tool for adult education

What is the MAP project about?

MAP stands for Motivate, Act, and Promote. These three concepts are key for adult educators who not only need to motivate adults to get involved in lifelong learning, but also to implement high-quality training activities which often address audiences that are difficult to reach.

The Erasmus+ project wants to empower educators to provide blended learning lessons which are a perfect fit for their target groups. This way you and your students stay motivated - which is especially important in these testing times: Currently, we never know when we’ll meet face-to-face or online, which makes blended learning a very important tool right now.

Today we want to give you an insight about the second module of our Train the Trainer Course, which teaches you all about blended learning. It explains how to review your learning content, your teaching style and methods for their appropriateness for blended learning.

 

Why should I review my learning content or teaching methods? If we have to hold a class online, I’ll just send a Zoom link to everyone and they’ll show up.

If you ask any student, they will tell you that especially in the first months during Covid this was the attitude online lessons were approached with. However, you as a teacher with high quality standards know that this will make your class size shrink quickly. Or, if participation is mandatory, motivation to partake will get lower and lower. The reasons for that are versatile: Maybe the life reality of your participants is not compatible with such an approach, or the teachers’ own digital skills are not as advanced as to cater to the needs of their target group. Either way an intersectional, inclusive way of teaching should be considered.

We all have a better time when learning (and teaching) is fun, no matter the circumstances. MAP wants to show you that with reflection, knowledge, and the right methods everybody can have a great time with the blended learning approach. To make the transfer from face-to-face teaching into the blended format work for all your participants (and yourself), it is important to take different aspects into account.

 

This sounds complicated. What kind of aspects would that be?

It’s not complicated at all, as long as you are willing to critically reflect your own work and be curious about learning new things (Okay, that may be harder than it sounds on paper… Who likes to question themselves, right?). Reflection is exactly what module 2 is all about. In a structured way it will

• help you understand your target groups’ life reality and their needs
• address learning differences and variable access to digital learning
• help you to keep your content up to date
• teach you how to explore new learning materials
• help you choose which content is suitable for online/offline learning and adapt your teaching and training methods for blended learning
• inform you about copyright and data protection (which is more important than you might think!)

That way you have excellent prerequisites to become an expert in blended learning.

 

That seems a lot of work…

Especially when working with “hard to reach” target groups, constant reflection of our practice and the world surrounding us is essential. It might seem like a lot of work, but we promise you that it’s absolutely worth it! Perceive it as a sustainable investment in your professional self.

The methods of module 2 and the course as a whole are no “one time thing”. They can be applied repeatedly. That way you’ll always be up to date and your best teaching-self. This way generations of future students will benefit from your work - their success should be the most important thing to us.

 

We invite you to work through module 2 as well as the other ones. Since you are an expert already, there will be topics you already know about. We’re pretty sure, though, you’ll find things you want to improve. Knowledge is power and we hope we can empower you with our Train the Trainer Course!