Enhancing the Blended Learning Experience through Flexibility: workshop session at the International Blended Learning Conference 2011

Few would argue with the notion that flexibility (often found coupled with words like personalisation and agility) is essential to operating in these challenging times especially with regard to meeting the needs of work-based learners, international students and students from outside the traditional demographic/educational background. Embracing flexibility meaningfully can however require a significant change to the organisational mindset. In many institutions there remains a hierarchy between ‘standard provision’ (shorthand for full-time, campus-based learning) and ‘non-standard provision’ (shorthand for everything else). Projects in the JISC Curriculum Design programme are developing blended learning approaches to address these challenges. To name but a few examples:

• Manchester Metropolitan University is making graduate employability central to all courses
• Leeds Met is using coaching approaches to personalise blended delivery for work-based learners
• Bolton is developing a business model based on Open Learning whereby learners combine free self-directed learning with chargeable support and accreditation in a blend that suits them
• Greenwich University has conducted a review of how it manages overseas partnerships and revealed impediments and constraints that contribute to overseas students having a poorer experience than UK campus-based students. 

Each of these projects has employed different approaches to engaging stakeholders in this process.  As part of its review process, Greenwich used soft systems methodology to help stakeholders identify to barriers to flexibility within the institution through rich pictures.  

After an introduction to the curriculum design programme and the flexibility challenge by Sarah Knight (programme manager) and a brief introduction to the Greenwich approach (Dr Claire Eustance, project manager),  workshop participants worked in groups to draw up a rich picture around the question 'what does flexible learning look like?'.  Here are the 4 pictures: