Blending Swedish - Practitional Research on Blended Learning
Blending Swedish is a Nordplus Project KTH carries out together with the University of Iceland and Aalto University. The project will investigate how to successfully integrate existing online material in classroom teaching, with "Learning Swedish" as applied research object. The project starts with a webinar about blended learning by Professor Martha Cleveland-Innes and Professor Stefan Hrastinski, both active at the Learningdepartment of KTH School of Education and Communication in Engineering Science (ECE).
Project Purpose
The general purpose of the Nordplus project is to:
- Help teachers interested in e-learning.
- Increase the efficiency of an already developed online course.
Kick-off Webinar
The project began with a webinar (in English) about blended learning on Friday, September 30, 9 am. The webinar form is a discussion between Professor Marti Cleveland-Innes, Centre for Distance Education, Athabasca University, Kanada (at the moment acting Head of the Learningdep. KTH/ECE) and Professor Stefan Hrastinski (Technology for Learning, KTH/ECE).
Practitional Research
The work will be driven by teachers from the partner universities but the project will be conducted as a collaborative online effort in which other universities, teachers and students are welcome both to participate in the project and to retrieve information from it, via this project homepage Read more on blendingswedish.se .
About Learning Swedish
Learning Swedish is a free online course (a so called MOOC, Massive Online Open Course) in Swedish for beginners with material for self-study for adult learners. The course started officially by the Swedish Institute (SI) in November 2015. In September 2016, there were over 45 000 registered users from all over the world. Read more about Learning Swedish .
Specific project goals for Blending Swedish are:
"The major questions are how this self-paced course, with no teacher support, and no feedback on oral or written production, can best be integrated in blended learning environments, and what support students not in the original target group (international university students coming to Sweden) are most likely to need. The project intend to design strategies and materials to flexibly and efficiently integrate LS in mixed learning environment based on research, proven experience and critical learning analysis of LS, and thus support existing teaching of beginners’ Swedish inside and outside the Nordic / Baltic region"