Designing blended learning courses: exploring the development and use of a toolkit to facilitate design

It is becoming increasingly evident that blended learning can overcome various limitations related to face-to-face instruction and online learning. Many studies have found that blended learning is becoming the norm for course delivery in higher education, with students identifying blended courses as best supporting how they learn. The question, therefore, has shifted from “Whether to blend or not?” to “how to design a successful blend?”. The literature shows that designing blended learning courses is still a major challenge for many academics in the higher education field. To enhance the understanding of blended learning course design and contribute towards the developing of the existing literature in this area, this research investigated the design of blended learning courses. It focused on two major design challenges: (i) deciding the proportion of online to face-to-face components to be incorporated into a blended course; and (ii) selecting the most appropriate delivery methods to achieve the course outcomes. A Delphi study of two rounds was conducted to identify and rate the importance of criteria that might influence each design challenge. Another Delphi study of two rounds was also conducted to assess the impacts of the identified criteria on the design of blended courses. The results of the two Delphi studies have informed the development of a blended learning design toolkit that can assist academics in designing their courses. The toolkit was developed as an online tool using C# and ASP.NET. The toolkit was also evaluated using a functional testing, a performance testing and an evaluation survey with 12 experts. The evaluation results demonstrated that the toolkit provides a clear, simple and efficient blended learning design process that can foster thinking about how to better design a blended course.