Incorporation of increased flexibility
and adaptivity in courses
can support freshmen with taking responsibility for their learning
process. This is especially beneficial in the case of chemistry courses
given their typically abstract nature and associated need for engaging
in practice and higher order thinking. Blended learning can be used
to achieve course flexibility and adaptivity, and increased student
engagement. Adopting blended learning requires teachers to reconsider
and redesign their course setup. The willingness for this will largely
be dictated by perceived practicality, however. To this end, our aim
is to develop practical redesign guidelines for flexible
blended learning. Such guidelines need to be instrumental, congruent,
and of ‘low cost’ for a teacher. The resulting four
guidelines were fine-tuned in two phases over 5 years using two introductory
chemistry courses and incorporated various blended learning elements,
such as slide-cast lectures, live lectures, formative in-cast multiple
choice questions, tutorials, formative electronic tutorial questions,
and student voting on the course schedule. The outcome of our multiyear
endeavor was positive and sustainable by all metrics used, including
online engagement by students, learning outcomes, and student evaluations.
The teachers in phase II largely embraced the guidelines emerging
from phase I, and in their course experienced them predominantly as
practical while limitations were also identified. We hope that our
guidelines and experiences can provide fellow teachers with a blueprint
for practical incorporation of flexibility and adaptivity using blended
learning in their chemistry courses.