Of course the technological components are important e.g. availability of technology to teachers and students, accessibility from home, speed of connection, ICT skills etc.

However, the use the teachers make of it determines to a large extent its success. By success i understand its ready use. I still have to see how to measure success and how it really impacts learning, which after all is the main objective.

I've created a course in VE English for Mechanical engineers; almost 70 per cent of lingvo-grammar exercises are integrated into the Moodle system. It appears, that the students themselves have to be responsible. The blended training is also effective, esp. if there are few lectures a week. The statistics data prepared after irregular verbs trainig are compared before exercising and afterwards; the results demonstrate obvious verbs knowledge development.

Actually, it appears, that there should be quite a few of various sorts of sizeable extent exercises, and, besides, quite a lot of installing them into VE metods used so that the trainig be not only interesting for the students, but also, very useful.

In Botswana at Botho University we are also starting to incorporate blended learning to allow those form remote areas to spend sometime in contact with the lecturers at the university and be able to self direct their learning. My concern is the students seem not to be learning on their own but depend entirely on lecturers during the contact period. It' effectiveness is questionable. We shall see as it progresses. Thank you

I think self learning requires additional effort from the lecturer in terms of change in pedagogy and exercises involving fun as well as research. However, once it starts, it is worth the effort. One thing i am using these days are short movies on youtube which complement the lecture. Online games are another very interesting artifact. I found some games on MIT website on strategic management to be simply superb (I have played them myself - have not yet integrated them in class). Another small game on project management was also a hit with my students (although lack of internet connectivity was a problem).

Ravi:

I think it depends on the nature of the subject content, how the technology is used to achieve the course outcomes, and the strength of the mix. At my School of Education, we have found that a weak blend (30% online and 70% F2F) works best for us. Perhaps, my recent conference paper on lesson learnt as a blended learning champion for my department may be useful here:

https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/

Best regards,

Debra