Blended learning's a balanced meal

I sometimes use a series of slides to try and get across what an effective blended solution might look like. I start with what it is not:

It is not a series of choices - in this case a cooked breakfast, cereal or a croissant. When you offer someone a choice of ways in which to undertake a learning activity, you may be doing them a favour by allowing them to express a preference, but you're not providing a blend. You get A or B or C, not AB, AC or some other combination.

It is not also not really adequate to offer a combination of similar components:

Eggs, eggs and more eggs - not very appetising, eh? You'll get a similar reaction if you serve up, say, a series of papers to read, a workbook and some web links. In themselves useful, but not enough to stimulate a complete learning process.

How about a sandwich?

OK, but you don't want a sandwich for every meal, do you? The classroom sandwich is probably the most common blend - that's a face-to-face event in the middle, with some self-study e-learning before and after. OK sometimes perhaps, but not very imaginative, is it? It's also rather depressing that the online components are represented by the bread on the outside, whereas the interesting stuff is reserved for the classroom.

No, a blended solution is more like a balanced meal:

And just as there are many thousands of recipes to cater for different occasions, the different tastes of the various guests, the availability of ingredients, your budget and the time you have available to get it all prepared, so a blended learning solution must be devised to cater for different learning requirements, the characteristics of the particular learners, and all sorts of practical resource constraints.

And, just as shopping for groceries was a relatively simple affair fifty years ago, when there were fewer ingredients on offer, but is so much more of a struggle now when as a shopper you are bombarded with thousands of possibilities, so the selection of learning media has been made so much more complex with the arrival of dozens of online opportunities. An abundance of choice makes it so much harder now for l&d professionals to design learning interventions, which is perhaps why they so often keep it simple by sticking to familiar options - easier in the short term, perhaps, but undoubtedly missing a whole load of tricks.

So what can we do to encourage more imaginative and appetising blended solutions? My suggestion is for organisations to make more of an effort to share recipes. Nothing beats a good example, one that you can copy and adapt to your own situation. So share your successful recipes and do your bit to avoid unhealthy consumption in the world of education and training.