Teachers’ Orientations When Designing Blended Learning Courses

Abstract

There is still a lack of empirical research on teachers‘ planning decisions. This applies to didactic decisions in the context of blended learning in particular, where both face-to-face and distance phases need to be meaningfully linked with each other. The course «abitur-online.nrw» has been available for more than 20 years – and thus well before the Covid-19 pandemic – as a part of second-chance education. Here, adult learners can acquire the Abitur in a combination of face-to-face and distance learning phases. In the BMBF project «DigiGO», we qualitatively analysed the planning decisions of 16 teachers on the basis of think alouds. The article provides insights into a contrastive comparison of two cases and illustrates the different orientations when designing a blended learning environment. While one teacher emphasizes the personal responsibility of adult learners and ascribes greater value to the face-to-face phases, the other emphasizes the equal value of the phases and the need to support learners in self-regulated learning. Finally, an examination of the entire interview material shows that existing design options do not appear to have been fully exploited to date.