When designing a curriculum for blended learning, instructional designers should consider:

• The role of blending in the overall learning strategy

• The purpose of a curriculum in general

• The competency and skills to be developed through the particular curriculum featuring blended learning The next three sections explore these issues.

The Role of Blending in the Overall Learning Strategy

A strategy is a formal, published document that outlines the role of learning in the organization and how the organization will deliver that learning. The strategy provides a general roadmap for the type of learning programs that the organization supports —and which ones it does not support—as well as the way that organization plans to integrate learning technologies into its overall approach to learning. A strategy should first clearly state why the organization supports learning and how learning supports the organization in achieving its broader goals. Then it states (a) who the intended learners are, (b) why they are participating in learning programs, (c) how learning will be provided, (d) how learning will be supported, (e) why the organization is using learning technologies to support this effort, (f) how efforts to move content online will be supported, (g) how success will be measured, and (h) a list of resources committed to this endeavor. This approach to developing a strategy is essentially the same in business, government, and academic organizations. Ultimately, the strategy represents a commitment to learning in general, and learning technology and blended learning in particular.

Some organizations, however, see blended learning as a quick way to break into e-learning, but have no strategy in place. On the one hand, the research suggests that this group is in the majority. In a survey of larger corporations, only 25 percent had a strategy for e-learning . But on the other hand, the results of such blended learning efforts could be disappointing. Sixty-two percent of learning technology initiatives fail to meet expectations.

The Purpose of a Curriculum

As mentioned earlier, most people think of blended learning as a course strategy, when it is actually a curriculum strategy. The word curriculum comes from a Latin word that means to run a course or racetrack and indicates a specific direction and distance. Curriculum design is the practice of designing a roadmap for taking a learner from knowing nothing about the content to reaching a designated level of competence with it.

As part of this effort, instructional designers must consider what they feel is the purpose of training and education. For example, for a corporate training curriculum, it might be asking a seemingly obvious question, like “Why do we train new employees?” Although the ostensible answer is that an organization does so in order that new employees can effectively perform a job, other purposes exist, such as integrating new employees into the corporate culture and building loyalty among them. Similarly, for an academic curriculum, some might respond that the purpose of education is “preparing learners to become productive members of society”; others might respond, “preparing learners for employment”; and still others might respond, “to help the learner develop critical thinking skills in the subject area.” Notice how these purposes are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

This, in turn, helps designers figure out which content will be emphasized strongly and which will receive less emphasis. For example, an instructional designer of a civics curriculum in a school who believes that the purpose of education is to create productive members of society might focus on topics of attitudes toward elections and the meaning of referendum questions, while an instructional designer of a civics curriculum who believes that the purpose of education is to prepare learners for employment might focus on voting procedures and employment opportunities in the political sphere.

The Competencies and Skills to Be Developed

With the values around education clarified, designers can consider the content to be addressed. As a starting point, some instructional designers begin by identifying the competencies and skills to be taught. This is where most corporate instructional designers begin. At this point, instructional designers would consider the following:

• What is the main competency that learners should develop while completing this curriculum? This isn’t a simple skill, like inserting a needle or solving a quadratic equation. Rather, this competency refers to something much more broad, such as “designing bridges that stand up” (civil engineering), “caring for patients” (nursing), and “performing in a drama” (theatre). Specifically, a competency is the quality of being fit physically and intellectually for a task. Bowie (1996) calls this main competency job one. Job one often gets lost in the minutia of planning specific aspects of the curriculum.

• What skills must learners master to successfully achieve this competency? These skills would be the main foci of designing a curriculum. For example, if the main competency is preparing customer support representatives to resolve problems with equipment or software (depending on the type of support provided), the main skills taught would include troubleshooting failures, diagnosing problems, and resolving them. Typically, a curriculum focuses on a limited number of main skills, and each main skill becomes the focus of a unique learning program (or part of a unique program). For example, the customer support curriculum might have separate programs on troubleshooting, diagnosing, and resolving problems.

Note, too, that in this discussion, the term “skill” also encompasses the term “knowledge.” The supporting knowledge needed to perform a main skill is ultimately expressed as a cognitive task—that is, a task that is performed internally rather than visibly, but whose results can be seen externally. For example, adding is a cognitive task because people generally perform it in their heads, but others can see the results of the addition. Similarly, matching prospective customers with the appropriate models of a product is a cognitive task. On the one hand, it requires that learners do something (match people and products), but it is performed internally. What makes these cognitive skills different from tasks like “understand” and “know” (which you have probably already learned are inappropriate for use in instructional objectives) is that if someone were to perform the skill while talking aloud, his or her cognitive process and the criteria for successful performance would be clear enough that different observers would likely reach the same conclusions. With knowing and understanding, different observers might reach different conclusions and have no externally verifiable criteria from which they can assess the differences in conclusions.

• What supporting skills must learners master to achieve the main ones? For example, to diagnose problems with software, learners must be able to distinguish between hardware and software problems, re-create problems (if needed and possible), and follow diagnostic procedures to isolate a specific problem. Because a complex task has many supporting skills, curriculum designers often identify several layers of supporting skills.

• What skills must learners have mastered before they can enter the curriculum? These are called entry skills. One of the challenges of teaching advanced topics is making sure that learners have the prerequisite skills and knowledge. For example, before learners can train to become computer support representatives, they must be able to describe the inner workings of a computer. But how can designers verify that these people can do so? Therefore, designers must also specify criteria for assessing the skill. In this instance, learners can explain how computers process information and how the different parts of the computer participate in that process.

Notice that in all of these examples, competencies and skills were expressed in observable and measurable terms, just like learning objectives. Although some competencies and skills are admittedly difficult to express in such a way, by making the extra effort to do so, instructional designers help to clarify the learning content to be covered in the curriculum. Explaining the inner workings of a computer differs from mapping out the processing of information and results in different information being taught.

Note, too, that instructional designers working like this approach curriculum planning from an output point of view: that is, they start by focusing on the end result, the output of the curriculum. Other approaches exist, and would approach the content differently. This identification of skills becomes a starting point for figuring out how to blend the content.