Blended Learning Solutions: The Future of Training?

With the challenges facing the globe in light of the pandemic, soaring energy costs and international conflict, the need for a well-trained and adept public sector has never been so great. Yet, at the same time, remote working, multi-generational learners and budgetary pressures have made it difficult for many learning and development departments to ensure that their employees are receiving the professional development that their roles require. A number of experts have argued that the answer to these challenges is blended learning.

What is Blended Learning?

Andrew Wickham, an expert in professional training, has described blended learning as the delivery of knowledge through the coordinated combination of digital content (e-learning) and live training (face-to-face or video conference). This model of training benefits from allowing learners to determine their own pace, and for being more adaptable and thus suitable for a wider audience.

Key Elements of Blended Learning

Blended learning is more than the simple combination of online and physical delivery. Instead, it involves the careful curation of the best elements of physical and online delivery, blended and enhanced by a range of emerging teaching tools.

Face-to-face personal instruction still remains one of the most popular forms of learning around the world, and is a crucial component of the blended learning model. The expertise of the trainer and the human touch involved in classroom-style training is crucial to ensuring that learners develop their knowledge and skills in a holistic manner.

E-learning, by contrast, is quickly becoming one of the most important means of learning today across the world. It constitutes all forms of educational technology from online and virtual education to digital education collaboration and web-based training. E-learning has dramatically improved the accessibility of professional development.

These two are then further enhanced by emerging teaching tools, and particularly those associated with Web 3.0, such as gamification, virtual classrooms, and augmented reality. These tools help bridge the gap between traditional in-person learning and e-learning, with its focus on creativity and user engagement.

Advantages of Adopting Blended Learning

In contrast to physical and e-learning, blended learning claims to deliver the best of both of worlds. Its advocates argue that there are three key advantages to this model: cost-effectiveness, flexibility and information retention.

In today’s world of economic uncertainty and rising inflation, organisations are required to ensure that their investment is being spent as efficiently as possible. Blended learning, reduces the cost of travel and venue hire, but it also reduces the admin time associated with content distribution and reporting. The subsequent reduced physical training time also means less time out of the core business.

Flexibility is perhaps the strongest argument in favour of blended learning. It allows learners to access training and content at a time, place and pace that suits them and matches their needs. Learners can consume the information at their own pace and can go back to it when they need it.

Studies have also shown that this form of learning improves information retention. Whilst face-to-face training is very useful in uplifting employee morale and encouraging collaboration, introducing e-learning elements allows learners to digest information at a pace that their comfortable with and gives them the option to revisit any parts of the syllabus that they may have initially struggled with. The option to determine the pace and to study in a perhaps more comfortable environment goes a long way to explaining why studies have shown that retention leaves of blended learning are around 25% compared to only 8-10% with traditional training.

Scope & Challenges

Blended learning solutions, though, do not come without their challenges. For instance, difficulty in acquiring new technology skills and the over-use of technology are issues that can already be observed. Resistance to organisational change might also pose a barrier to blended learning initiatives in some parts of the world.

Yet, in a world of ever-changing technology, it is perhaps inevitable that blended learning will become the new norm for professional development. Its benefits – cost effective, flexible – will increasingly outweigh barriers to entry, especially as virtual reality begins to enter the mainstream.