Do you wanna be splendid? Blend it!

For many years e-learning was a buzz-word linked to many promises but also to many failures. This year I visited some conferences and attended several workshops and lectures related to blended learning and e-learning. It was remarkable to discover how many of my fellow participants were either in an early stage of implementing e-learning in their organization or were unhappy about earlier attempts to implement computer aided learning and struggling to find better ways. Many of the solutions proposed were linked to embedding in the organization. I will try to cover them in a future post.
Now I want to dedicate this posting to a hugely successful example of implementation of simple e-learning tools and of blending it with other forms of learning.
Salman Khan was a young brilliant guy working for a hedge fund, who made some very simple video clips for his cousins to help them understand mathematics. According to Salman himself they preferred a video over seeing him in real life. Reasons mentioned: a video is always there when you need it and a video never gets bored explaining the same thing twice, or three times......
Strangely, Khan was not upset but rather felt encouraged to make many more videos. The videos became available via youtube and the rest is as they say, history. Within a few years Khans simple videos attracted a crowd of more than one million people. The Khan academy features now in 2012 over 3000 videos and the number is rapidly increasing.
This is the known story and a success on its own. However Salman Khan's ambition is now to really improve the quality of learning and realises that merely adding a few thousand videos to youtube and organising them in a catalogue will not do that job. His proposal is to "flip the class". Instead of using teachers time to explain basic rules and define tasks and projects as homework, he proposes to give the basic explanations and lectures as video and save teachers time for setting up projects. In addition he makes databases with quizzes and questions available to students and teachers. Teachers can easily monitor the progress of the students and dedicate time to the people who need it most. In my personal opinion it is this mix of simple videos, elaborate quizzing and monitoring techniques and good-old fashioned teachers attention which will prove blended learning to become splendid learning.
For more info on Khan and his academy follow this link On the top of the page there is a section referring to many inspiring speeches and interviews.

learning complex tasks with 4C-ID

Education traditionally focuses on acquiring skills and knowledge on isolated  subjects. As a result, the learners find it difficult to integrate and apply the knowledge, skills and behaviours when they start in the job.

In contrast, Four Component Instructional Design (4C-ID) is used to design training that centers around complete and meaningful tasks relating to the daily life of a professional. It focuses on developing complex skills and professional competencies. The method was pioneered by Prof. van Merrienboer and colleagues from the Open University and Maastricht University in the Netherlands. It is now widely applied to develop curricula in schools for higher education as well as in companies.

The core of this model is a "whole task approach". Students are from the beginning working on complete and meaningful tasks which are comparable to what they could encounter in their professional life. These learning tasks are grouped on basis of equivalent complexity in so called task-classes. Within a task-class the level of difficulty or complexity stays the same. For the first tasks in a class-task the learner will get a lot of support from the teacher or from the material in order to complete the task. For instance it can be a so called Worked out Problem in which the learner studies a problem togehter with a model solution, the input from the student could be limited in arguing why the solution is a good one, or other simple questions. Within a task class the level of support is decreasing going from one learning task to the next. Tasks at the end of a task class have only very little or no support and the students will have to solve a case on their own. The principle of decreased support or decreased scaffolding is shown in the figure below where the solid green box indicates the support.

The complexity of the tasks is increasing when going from one task-class to the next. This is demonstrated in the figure below. Please note that not every task class does not necessarily have the same amount of tasks related to it.

The training material relating to this whole task approach consists of 4 components, hence the name of the methodology. The four components are: 1) learning tasks as discussed above 2) supportive information 3) part-task practice 4) procedural  (Just In Time) information.

ad 1) Learning tasks within a task-class should have as much variation as possible. Further as indicated above they should give an authentic task experience, be organised in task classes according to complexity. Within task-classes the tasks are ordered on basis of decreased scaffolding.

ad 2) Supportive information can be considered as "theory", it belongs to all the tasks of one task class, is always available to the students and consists of mental models, cognitive strategies and cognitive feedback. In practice it takes the form of manuals, power point hand outs, text books etc.

ad 3) Part Task Practice is mixed between the learning tasks to train routine skills. Often the purpose is to increase fluency or speed in a routine aspect of the work.

ad 4) Just in Time information is information relating to recurrent aspects of the tasks. This info is required to perform the tasks. Often it takes the form of job-aids or other forms of information display. The idea is to only provide it until the learner has acquired sufficient expertise to perform without.

The figure below demonstrates the interrelationships between the different components within one task class.

In my professional life I am very satisfied with the results of the 4C-ID method and its use in curriculum design. In case you're interested, I used the following sources and I can recommend them for further reading.
Books (Dutch):
A.M.B. Janssen-Noordman, J.J.G. van Merrienboer,
Innovatief onderwijs ontwerpen, 2002, Wolters Noordhoff,
ISBN90-01-43246-8

B.Hoogveld, A.M.B. Janssen-Noordman, J.J.G. van Merrienboer,
Innovatief onderwijs in de praktijk, 2011, Noordhoff
ISBN 978-90-01-78931-2

For Non-Dutch readers: on the web you can find many English language articles on the topic by searching in Google on "4C ID", such as:
Blueprints for complex learning: the 4C/ID model