Mainstreaming Blended Learning in a Low-Income University

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Maseno University (MU) began to consider institutional shift from traditional face-to-face (F2F) instructions to online and blended modes of teaching and learning. The university was able to draw from its experience with adapted flexible and blended learning (FBL) approaches for high enrollment common courses already offered to students on the Learning Management System (LMS). Several questions have been raised: How to preserve what most lecturers consider as most essential — the regular student interaction, the freewheeling give-and-take discussion sessions — if the class cannot be together in the same physical space at the same time? How to make a synchronous activity dependent course and make it work in a completely asynchronous environment? How to handle the practical based subjects on the online platform? And even if the university is able to find acceptable answers to these questions, where would it begin? However, MU did not try to reinvent the wheel. There were already examples of good practice in a number of common courses had been running on the LMS. The available courses already had a blend of both theory and practical base. The university sought assistance from schools and departments that already had parts of their programmes running on the LMS. They were able to tap into their expertise and get introduced to a valuable collection of resources about online distance teaching and learning (ODTL). That, in turn, assisted the university to develop online or blended versions of its regular F2F courses that far surpassed expectations, judging from how well their courses performed, and get ready for any other unexpected circumstance equal or similar to which the world has had to live through the COVID-19 pandemic.