The future of blended learning
Sponsored by Proprep
Covid-19 has highlighted the importance of online learning in higher education, but what does the future hold for blended learning?
The pandemic has brought the importance of online learning into the spotlight, as well as the higher education institutions that struggled to quickly adapt and offer effective online support to their students. As we slowly emerge from the pandemic, we’re seeing how universities’ teaching methods have been impacted, and what important lessons have been learned.
It’s hard to believe that a year ago, the term “blended learning”, where online education is combined with traditional classroom-based methods, was virtually unheard of outside of the world of academia. But when the first lockdown was announced in March 2020, universities were forced to rapidly shift their teaching and learning resources online, subjecting their existing digital resources to the ultimate stress-test. This presented a whole host of obstacles for both students and lecturers.
As an online learning resource provider, whose innovative processes offer students studying STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) modules in university video tutorials customised to their exact syllabus, Proprep was already ahead of the digital learning curve.
The beginning of the revolution in digital learning
Before Covid-19, teaching methods were already in need of an overhaul. A 2014 meta study confirmed that students studying STEM degrees using passive learning methods such as traditional lectures were 1.5 times more likely to fail. However, adopting an active learning model and putting the student at the centre of different teaching methods such as flipped, blended and online classes achieved far better learning outcomes. Also, multiple studies demonstrated that video is a highly effective educational tool, and shorter videos in particular allow students to process information more efficiently and have improved memory recall.
This research confirmed the methodology that Proprep, which launched in the UK in 2019, was already using to develop its study tools. Proprep placed short online video tutorials at the cornerstone of its successful blended learning model, which also includes online workbooks, study guides and practice questions and solutions.
Focusing on STEM subjects, and using award-winning artificial intelligence and a team of seasoned professors with more than a decade of experience, Proprep built a vast library of more than 50,000 online video tutorials, all between five and seven minutes long. Proprep continues to add to this on a weekly basis and can develop resources customised to a specific university module, which includes 75 to 95 video tutorial hours and around 1,200 practice questions and study guides, in less than 20 minutes.
This technology has already achieved incredible results in Israel and the USA, with more than 500,000 students and lecturers relying on this innovative method to create learning materials.