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teaching, coaching, studying, and practicing (Figure 6.2). Each of these learn­ing modalities can be accomplished with classroom learning or e-learning. These modalities open up the possibilities for creating a much more granular, and ultimately effective, blended learning approach.

The teaching quadrant offers a presentation of content to students. Examples of teaching include an instructor presenting a lecture to a group of students using a whiteboard and digitally projected slides, a videotaped presentation made avail­able to employees, and a teacher demonstrating how a software application works.

In the coaching quadrant, students are given the opportunity to practice skills through structured lab exercises that are supported and facilitated by an expert. Examples of exercises include students working with an instructor on simple drill-and-practice activities, an instructor mentoring students in authentic problem-solving lab scenarios, and a group of learners participating in a collaborative problem-based learning exercise that is facilitated by a subject matter expert.

In the studying quadrant, a student spends time working with and learning from information. The information may or may not be designed as instructional content. Examples of studying include a student reading a white paper or book and students working through a specific technology-based training module.

A Learning Ecology Model for Blended Learning from Sun Microsystems 83

In the practicing quadrant, students learn by working on problems or project re­quirements they may encounter in their job role. Examples of projects include stu­dents working through case studies and authentic scenario-based activities and students encountering and working on actual job-centered projects with their peers.

Figure 6.3 illustrates examples of specific learning elements that may come into play as we design instruction within the learning ecology. In a sense, this is a menu of learning options that could be developed and delivered to support a learn­ing requirement. The learning ecology enables us (and our customers) to make choices about which options we will bring to a learning offering to meet the spec­ified learning and cost objectives.

Each of the high-level categories on the matrix contains a number of distinct instructional, learning, and knowledge elements. These elements can be assem­bled into models of best practice aggregation strategies that produce different types of learning events. Koper (2001) refers to these aggregations of instructional and learning strategies as "units of study, the smallest unit providing learning events for learners, satisfying one or more interrelated objectives."

To illustrate an ecology aggregation, we can use the example of a collabo­rative group activity that has been identified as a best practice strategy for teaching

Figure 6.3. Specific learning elements.

Studying Learner Self

• Books, articles, guides

• References

• White papers

• Asynchronous content

• job aids

• Glossaries

• FAQs

Content Delivery

Focus

• Classroom lectures

• Synchronous content

• Demonstrations

• Reviews/discussions

• Video

• Videoconferencing

-Navigation Practicing

• Authentic tasks

• Role play

• Projects

• Case studies

• Peer discussion

• Discussion forums

Experience and

Practice Focus

• Exercises

• Diagnostic labs

• Practice labs

• Mentoring/tutoring

• Experiments

Teaching Guided N

ion Coaching

The Handbook of Blended Learning

a problem-solving skill. The design criteria for creating this best practice unit of study are:

• It is a collaborative group activity.

• The activity uses an authentic problem scenario.

• The activity is mentored by an expert.

• Correct performance is demonstrated by an expert.

• Learners will work in self-managed project teams.

• The activity will be supported with:

Reference manuals

Procedure guides

Asynchronous Web-based instructional content

In this example, the instructional strategy uses elements aggregated from all quadrants of the learning ecology to form a unit of study to address the specific instructional strategy.

A partial list of our current learning elements is shown in Table 6.1. The variety of these elements provides a rich palette for developing units of learning. Applying the model is a relatively straightforward activity of deciding overall strate­gies and then aggregating elements.

We have found that coupling a blend of online modalities with traditional classroom treatment has allowed more efficient use of classroom time (through prework) as well as extending the overall learning time (through postclass