Presentation

Hybrid Approaches in DE Teaching-Learning

Everyone knows that the face-to-face class carries certain benefits and numerous disadvantages, while the DE has numerous benefits and certain disadvantages when we consider true learning from those seeking knowledge. Then, depending on the characteristics and the implicit demands on the content of the theme to be taught, the academic maturity and the availability of study time by the learner, and finally on the degree of technological sophistication shared by these two elements, it is possible to free the imagination and try to plan a course that mixes only beneficial elements of the two modalities. At least in theory.

The most common obstacles are the resistance from traditional teachers, old habits brought unconsciously from the conventional classroom, the excessive government ruling (requiring a "single model" of pedagogical strategy) and the lack of familiarity with the fullness of learning objects. These, in turn, embedded in the global web as "open educational resources", offering a rich variety of media content (such as texts, videos, simulations, and graphics - some with interactive features), all with Creative Commons - indicating license for free use, as long as there is credit to the original.

Therefore, as a music composer enjoying all kinds of sounds available (strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion and keyboards), the person responsible for a distance course has elements of face-to-face activity available. Meetings involving apprentices interested in the same subject, taking advantage of sophisticated scientific equipment (or, in the case of health care, patients who represent experiential contact for apprentices), elements of DE (streaming video with lectures, debates, documentaries, tours in museums and specialized libraries, physically interesting sites for learning), and all this seasoned with the careful inclusion of learning objects and open educational resources selected from international mode.

Education has never had such a wealth of informational variety. No student receiving this range of presentation of knowledge can complain about boring school, or classes divorced from the reality of the future profession. There is no specific algorithms to ensure success in this type of project, as there is for the music composer. Each E-LEARNING program, university, school, company, government agency or independent teaching, has the role of experimenting with different models, looking for making the mixing, the hybridization, the blending of didactic resources available, to reach the ideal model for the needs.

By releasing this theme for the 2019 Congress, ABED Board of Directors intends to challenge the members of our professional community to think about the theoretical and practical aspects of this matter - innovation in ingredients used in courses part face-to-face and part in DE, scrutiny of "total experience" of the student (when this moves away from the conventional model of the past), and new criteria for the evaluation of better joining of apprentices. We will continue looking for the true pioneers of this new model of doing DE - combining the best qualities of face-to-face and those mediated by technology.

Fredric M. Litto
President of ABED