Designing blended learning communities

Abstract

This chapter seeks to highlight the unique characteristics of blended learning communities and the special design consideration they call for. The blended nature of a community is reflected through the interplay of the online and offline dimensions of a community and the mix of various media in support of community-wide interaction. The authors introduce the notion of blended learning community based on related literature on learning community and blended learning and put forward design guidelines for building such communities. Further, a pilot study was conducted to test out the proposed design principles in the context of pre-service teacher education with blogs as the main vehicle for online communication. The authors’ work can contribute to a deepened understanding of learning communities situated in the blended media environment and provide a set of design principles for their development.