Exploring the Models of Designing Blended & Online Learning Courses for Adoption in Regular Teacher Education Course

Abstract

Models of online and blended teaching-learning have a unique feature regarding their development. The changes here are brought by technological advances, and only with the accumulating experiences of teaching, the pedagogical understandings have emerged. Online and blended learning modes have several features that support the fast-changing needs of professions. The Teaching profession is a profession where the changes in content happen at a relatively slow pace. The slow pace of change is one of the reasons that online and blended education has not been adopted in teacher education. The teacher education institutions should step forward to take up the responsibility to integrate blended online mode in their practice. It is in this context the study identified the potentials of different online course design models for use in a regular teacher education course. The surveyed models are Classroom type online learning, Massive open online courses (MOOCs), ADDIE Model, Online Collaborative Learning (OCL), Community of Inquiry (COI), Competency-based learning (CbL), Communities of practice (CoP). Their merits, demerits and potentials for being used in a regular mode teacher education course had been explored. The study concluded that the best suiting model was the Community of Inquiry (COI). Templates for designing blended and online courses based on COI had been suggested.