The title of this paper echoes Nicholas Carr's (2008) article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, which evoked heated debate around the issue of whether the Internet was having negative effects upon human concentration and learning. While this paper agrees that blended learning has the same issues as the Internet, blended learning is under the control of organizations, institutions, instructors and students. Whether our brains are being changed for better or worse is not the critical question, but how much confidence we ascribe to blended learning. This paper argues that blended learning should be regarded as blended teaching because the phrase comprises a contested assumption. Educators, by their selection of traditional and online media, have complete control over this teaching, but students, in the end, are the ultimate arbiters of their own learning.
The evaluation of entire degrees or programs of study is not a routine activity unlike the evaluation of individual units. However such evaluations can be useful and highlight issues and show both positive and negative student opinions on their learning. The paper shows the results of an evaluation of the Bachelor of Communication from 2015 to 2018.
Although it is a legal requirement of all organizations to permit sensorially, cognitively, and physically disabled persons equitable access to public website information, cultural factors are seldom considered as important in the design of online information content. But many tertiary institutions have a highly diverse, multicultural student body whose learning needs require special attention. Usually, instructors transform existing lectures and exercises, then adds links, and discussions to create Web-supported units, but without any real understanding of possible cultural artifacts or inherent limitations of their online interfaces. This study reports on the results of an action research study whereby students were asked to comment on their preferences for three uniquely different purpose-built WebCT pages which comprised near-identical content. The students showed a definite preference for a sparse, menu-driven webpages as opposed to a colorful, congested, all-in-one interface, or the bare-bones WebCT interface.
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