How College Faculty Experience Designing Blended Courses They Teach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blended learning has been growing and evolving in higher education since the early 2000s. Despite extensive quantitative research examining blended course use and exploration of how students experience blended-courses, more situated, local research about faculty members’ experiences was needed. The purpose of this qualitative study was to develop a deeper understanding of faculty members’ experiences during the decision-making process in designing blended courses they teach. The conceptual framework was grounded in Engeström’s activity theory to allow an exploration of individual agency within a specific community setting. Faculty members’ decision-making experiences and perceptions were explored using an interpretive description methodology. A diverse group of 12 faculty members was purposefully selected from a single public college in Ontario, Canada to participate in semistructured individual interviews. The data were collected and analyzed using a two-cycle coding plan that revealed three key themes and two subthemes. The five findings showed (a) a common understanding that blended courses include a dominant face-to-face and passive online part, (b) design decisions occur on a student-self and value-cost continuum, (c) course ownership is central to agency, (d) the myth of experience exists, and (e) a major disruption causes reassessment of decision-making influencers. As a result of this exploration, positive social change is possible in that institutions may recognize that faculty members need more time and quality professional development to design and teach rich blended courses for learning, while faculty members may gain understanding of how to enhance learner engagement and success through blended-course design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".