The landscape of teaching and learning is evolving fast owing to the technological development in the 21st-century. The extensive amalgamation of these technologies into our society, combined with admittance to the internet has intrinsically changed the concept of teaching in just a few years. Integrating traditional face-to-face education with technology, Blended learning has become increasingly popular in educational institutions at present. Ensuring an effective route for faculty-students engagement through visuals and online interaction, blended learning has emerged as a new-age educational trend.
Some of the unique benefits of adopting blended learning as a new-age learning educational trend are mentioned below:
- Flexibility: Providing ultimate flexibility in presenting content, a blended learning approach makes it easier to learn through various available platforms rather than just classroom teachings. Although complex topics are available in the classroom, other subject matters can be accessed online. Through an online component, it increases the flexibility and convenience over how and when can students participate in training as per their convenience.
- Efficiency and Effectiveness: Blended learning possesses the established possibilities to enhance both the effectiveness and efficiency of meaningful learning experiences. With a properly planned blended learning strategy, knowledge can be delivered efficiently and quickly to a broad audience. With digital assets including videos, recordings and eBooks, the probability of re-using this technology again and again is enormous which can help more people to gain pace, even after the initial rounds of training have passed.
- Cost-effectiveness: Blended learning strategy can be very much economical as there is the flexibility of accessing its services anytime and anywhere without worrying about commutation and tuition fees. Incorporating shared digital platforms, it has more online options in its training and educational programs which saves on travel and missed work. When hosting live events online, the traveling costs and other costs regarding the basic necessities of students and instructors are eliminated which makes such programs more cost-effective.
- Personalization: Ensuring effective personal learning experience, a well-crafted blended solution can provide a continuous transition from classroom to computer or vice-versa. Through blended learning, students can adopt ways of continuing learning and discussion as per their need and availability.
- Diversity: Implementing a blended learning strategy lessens the classroom teaching time. Owing to the adoption of advanced technology and digitization, students can seamlessly access the expertise of talented instructors or subject-matter experts or anyone with high-quality content at a fraction of the cost. This enables the knowledgeable instructors to take more classes or produce more effective educational content.
- Teacher Empowerment: By integrating technology into classroom learning methodologies, teachers gain availability to reach out more students. Data ensured by these blended educational programs integrated with technology also empowers teachers with the understandings about the learning mechanisms of individual students, so that they can effectively address more gaps.
Ensuring that the learner is pragmatically engaged and driving his/her individual learning experience, the blended learning approach also helps them to cater the individual needs of the learner. As most students have exceptional learning styles, the blended learning methodology is more likely to contribute to those needs than a traditional classroom teaching experience.
