The Repurposing Education through Blended Learning ( REBEL) project is both a surgical response to the disruption of schooling caused by Covid-19 and a longer-term plan to support improved learning with all children. The project seeks to achieve this goal first through a systematic review of the evidence on the use of blended learning in schools, supplemented by the experience of the team and by case studies of blended learning in the first phase of the project. 5 schools in each of the partner countries will be invited to take part in the case studies which will include primary and secondary schools and tutors working in Initial Teacher Education. This case study work will provide rich contextual insights into the way that blended learning is understood in primary schools and across different subjects in secondary schools. A rigorous mixed-methods approach will be used for the collection and analysis of data. It is already clear, however, that one of the key elements of successful online learning for young people, as well as adults, is purposeful interaction through the development of social, cognitive and teacher presence. At present, few, if any courses on blended learning for teachers place sufficient emphasis on this. The second phase of the REBEL project, therefore, will be the development of professional development courses in all 4 of the partner countries and at the same time, the co-creation of an evaluation framework to help schools assess their needs in this area. A total of 200 schools across the four countries will be involved in the training. The course will be piloted and will be based around a core of key elements related to the ways that blended learning can make use of both synchronous and asynchronous tools to foster an inclusive learning environment. The third and final phase of the REBEL project will be the dissemination of key findings through a MOOC and a website
The pandemic created the conditions for a huge Covid-19 natural educational experiment, one where conventional schooling has been interrupted by a supernova (Azorin 2020). The European response to this ‘supernova’ was the implementation of emergency remote teaching and learning. This experience of remote teaching and learning has opened up new possibilities and challenges for education reform. Educators, policymakers, and researchers have the opportunity to learn from this experience and use these insights to shape the future of education. One of the key goals is to create a more flexible and accessible educational system that caters to the needs of all learners. However one of the critical challenges and requirement for the schools sector is extracting ‘blended learning’ from conversations rooted in the language of ‘emergency remote teaching and learning’. Blended learning shouldn’t be viewed as a response to an emergency but as a deliberate instructional practice to optimise learning. The success of blended learning is not without significant other challenges, as it requires a further shift in the role of teachers as facilitators of learning. Secondly, it requires a well-designed curriculum that is flexible enough to allow for a variety of learning paths. Thirdly, it requires the use of appropriate technology tools to support learning. Additionally, it requires a change in assessment practices that align with the new mode of instruction. It is widely believed that blended learning offers many benefits, such as increased engagement, personalised learning, and greater flexibility in the learning process, but it also requires careful planning and execution. Given the relative paucity of research on blended learning in schools, data was gathered from five case study schools in each of the partner countries. The ensuing paper deconstructs parents, teachers and students’ understanding of the challenges and opportunities of blended learning in the schools sector with perceptions shaped by enforced school closures during the pandemic. The findings from these case studies make several contributions including a need to differentiate between blended learning, emergency remote teaching and the suite of additional factors that impacted the school closure experience for teachers and schools. In addition, the findings signpost some succinct questions for consideration, that is, what conditions; social, cognitive and teacher presence, resources and supports are necessary for effective intentional blended learning in schools. Following this research, the second objective of the project was to develop a practitioner training programme to provide professional development courses for teachers in primary and secondary schools which enable them to make effective use of blended learning both as a short-medium response to Covid 19 and in the longer term as a means of questioning and extending their professional practice. A key strand of this work is the focus on the use of blended learning for intercultural learning. A parallel output of this work is an accompanying teacher training toolkit; that provides guidance for teachers on key considerations of blended learning and designing for culturally responsive blended learning. The third objective was to develop an evaluation framework with standards to assist all relevant stakeholders in their understanding of effective blended learning practice. Finally, a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) would be developed to integrate the learning from phases one and two of the project and disseminate key findings and best practices.
The Covid-19 pandemic created unprecedented challenges for education systems worldwide, with an estimated 1.5 billion students unable to attend school in 2020. Hodges et al. (2020) referred to this period as ‘emergency remote teaching’ (ERT). For most countries, regardless of their digital readiness, teachers had to quickly obtain rapid professional learning on digital tools like video conferencing and learning management systems to continue teaching via technology-mediated processes (Roulston et al. 2021). A survey by the European Commission revealed that many European primary and secondary schools lacked experience in distance learning using digital technologies (European Commission, 2021, p.3). However despite these challenges, the pandemic period provided an opportunity for education systems to learn from the experience of emergency remote teaching and consider the potential for more frequent and wide-scale use of digital technologies and in particular blended learning in schools, allowing for greater flexibility in the place, pace, and time of teaching and learning. To corroborate this, UNICEF (2022) found that two-thirds of the countries surveyed for a recent report were planning to enhance blended/ hybrid learning beyond the pandemic. Some European countries, like Ireland, now require schools to use technology to the greatest extent possible to maintain teaching and support during unexpected closures (Department of Education, 2022). While blended learning has benefits such as increased flexibility and personalisation, Williamson & Hogan (2021) argue that online teaching and learning is not necessarily transformative and this could also be said to be the case for blended learning. The absence of evaluation frameworks and standards for blended learning leads to varying strategies and potentially stifling and inhibiting experiences for teachers and students (Brown et al., 2022, p.81). Without at least some loosely bound standards and further studies on how to effectively use internet technologies to mediate and enhance blended modalities for education that can be physically distant, blended learning can be anything that schools, teachers, or education systems want it to be. Blended learning has the potential to be empowering and liberating, but it can also be stifling and inhibiting. Challenges related to technology-mediated learning during the pandemic were reported in various jurisdictions, indicating the need for further studies and professional development to effectively utilize internet technologies in blended modalities for education (Busuttil and Farrugia, 2020; Education and Training Inspectorate, 2021) The needs addressed by this project were both broadly related to blended learning as an instructional practice and specifically related to inclusion and culturally responsive teaching and learning within a blended learning design. During the period of this project there has been a rise in immigration to European countries, as Europe has stood in solidarity with the Ukraine. This has added to the diverse range of cultures among students in schools. To better respond to this diversity and to address the International Sustainable Development Goal of inclusive and equitable education for all, this project was undertaken to explore how blended learning in schools could support educators cater to the needs of students with a migration background. The aim was to create a more inclusive and equal educational experience for the diversity of students in European classrooms. While much has been written about blended learning in higher education , there is still little research and practical guidance on how blended learning can be used effectively in K-12 schools, especially in the context of diverse student populations. Within the context of this project, while the four countries all faced similar school closure challenges during the pandemic, they are historically and culturally very different, which added to the richness of debate and project response. The project was divided into three phases or waves 1) Case studies from each of the four partner countries 2) Development of a practitioner training programme, and a teacher toolkit 3) Development of an evaluation framework and MOOC to embed learning from phase two and as a deliberate strategy towards the sustainability of findings and developments.