Introduction

The BlendKit Course is a set of subject matter neutral, open educational resources related to blended learning available for self-study or for group use. Periodically, these materials will also be used as the basis for a facilitated open, online course. (See below for information on the most recent facilitated offering: BlendKit2012.)

The goal of the BlendKit Course is to provide assistance in designing and developing your blended learning course via a consideration of key issues related to blended learning and practical step-by-step guidance in helping you produce actual materials for your blended course (i.e., from design documents through creating content pages to peer review feedback at your own institution).

Disclaimer: The BlendKit Course does not address technical issues associated with specific course management systems (e.g., Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, etc.). Please consult with the appropriate personnel at your institution for CMS training and for any required credentialing prior to offering a blended learning course.

Course Components/Navigation

Course Home | Schedule | Learning Activities | DIY Tasks | Readings | Blogging | Recordings

BlendKit2012

The BlendKit Course materials are the basis for an open, online course facilitated by Dr. Kelvin Thompson and Dr. Linda Futch. It runs from September 24, 2012 – October 29, 2012. To the static BlendKit course materials (i.e., readings from scholarly works pertaining to blended learning, document templates, and practical step-by-step “how-to” guides), BlendKit2012 adds five weeks of facilitation in the form of regular email communications, weekly webinars with guest presenters, and blogging/social networking interaction opportunities. Recordings of both the standalone faculty interviews and of weekly webinars remain available on the BlendKit Recordings page. (Feel free to view last year’s archived webinars from BlendKit2011!)

Review a 6 minute narrated overview of BlendKit2012.

Registration

Register now to participate in BlendKit2012 for free! (This will ensure that you receive all communications.)

Once you’ve registered, please consider joining the HootCourse dialogue (via Facebook or Twitter ID) and sharing your blog URL. If you haven’t blogged before, give it some thought.

Make It Better

If you choose to re-use or remix any of the BlendKit Course materials in your own organization, we would love to hear about it! Also, if you have any ideas for improving any of the BlendKit Course components, please share them. Do you have examples of materials that would benefit others? We’d be happy to link to them or upload them to this site with attribution to your work. Please let us know. Please contact Dr. Kelvin Thompson at kelvin@ucf.edu.

What are people saying about the BlendKit Course?

The following is an RSS feed of the most recent blog postings, tweets, Flickr images, and Diigo bookmarks related to the BlendKit Course. NOTE: If an error message appears below, please just reload this page.
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  • Jennifer Imazeki

    Well, I managed to go the entire five weeks of the Blendkit course (and then some) without actually blogging about it (or about anything else for that matter). For awhile I was mired in mid-semester grading (I thought I was being so smart the way I spread out exams and papers but instead, as soon as I finished one stack, there was another one coming in), and then, well, life happened. I'll try to catch up with the blended stuff eventually...

    One of the things that has been distracting me is putting together my 'teaching portfolio'. My chair would like to nominate me for a teaching award, which is very cool, but I need to put together a teaching portfolio that he can submit with his nomination. Although I have a statement about my teaching that I wrote for my tenure and promotion reviews, this portfolio needs to be much more extensive. Specifically, the guidelines for the award say it should include "such items as: recommendation letter(s), summaries of student evaluations and evidence of awards, content expertise, instructional design and/or delivery, mentoring, student accomplishments, and commitment to improving pedagogical practice." Unfortunately, I don't think I can tell the committee to just read my blog so I've been trying to organize and succinctly explain all the various things I do in my classes. I found a couple of good resources about what should be in a teaching portfolio and that has helped a lot with the organization part; I'm still working on 'succinctly explain' part...

    One of the unexpected benefits of doing this has been that I can see, in one place, all the things I've accomplished with my teaching. It's only been a couple of years since I went up for promotion to full professor but my teaching portfolio contains a lot of information that wasn't really explicit in my RTP files. And while I do use this blog as a way to chronicle the various things I try in the classroom, going through and systematically listing those things has been kind of neat. As we slog through the daily ups and downs of classes, it's too easy to get lost in the weeds; it's good to step back and look at the overall picture and realize how much we've actually accomplished. I highly recommend it... 

    Mon, 19 Nov 2012 21:14:00 +0000