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Approaches to Blended Learning

Prior to 2020, our business model relied on face-to-face interaction to help align and excite organisations about agility and creating a learning organisation. When COVID hit, the world as we knew it changed in an instant. Like so many others it didn’t take long to see that our business model was no longer sustainable, and our digital strategy had to be accelerated.

Interestingly, the Chinese word for “crisis” is said to be comprised of two characters signifying danger and opportunity.  This is not completely accurate, as the second character has multiple meanings, and more closely relates to “changepoint”. But I digress, COVID was our change point, we had to innovate and without delay do things differently.

Since 2020, we’ve been on a path of discovery, learning the best way to deliver outcomes via a range of platforms. With crisis comes focus, and with focus, we were able to pivot our programs to be delivered over video conferencing platforms and online collaboration tools. With this momentum, we thought why stop there.

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of 21 Lessons for the 21st century, outlines the need to shift away from traditional academic skills like rote learning and transition towards approaches that foster critical thinking and adaptability.

 

This sparked an idea: could the move to education technologies act as the catalyst during this “changepoint” to create new and more effective methods of educating people in the skills of the future?

At the Elabor8 Academy, we hypothesized that it will.  Early in 2021, we implemented a new learning management system and added the capability to build online content. Since then we’ve been experimenting and learning about blended approaches that package theory into short self-directed online courses. Valuable face-to-face time is used to go deeper, to enable our clients and students to contextualise theory and put theoretical learning into practice. But more importantly, challenge their own mindset in order to be more effective with a focus on learning and outcomes.

You’ve told us that we need to close the gap between the theory and the application, in our new blended learning programs we’re doing just that.  You bring your real-world problems and we spend face-to-face time directing and guiding you to make the connections between the theory and how you put it into practice. Over a six week program, you will learn by doing and have the guiding support of a trainer practitioner throughout.

At the end of the last year, we talked about our aims to flip the classroom when we launched our online offering.  Now we’ve done it.

Talk to us about our new offerings and how we can help you embed a developmental culture in your organisation.