10+ Best Blended Learning Strategies & Tools For Your Course

With the right strategies, blended learning can drive fantastically positive student experiences, which ultimately lead to successful learning outcomes.

But what do you need to know before you start? If you’re looking for ways to make your e-course, online curricula, or workshops more impactful, here’s what you need to know to create an engaging, effective program.

Before you continue, we think you’ll love our $1 trial of Quenza, the blended learning software for your organization. Quenza’s user-friendly digital tools will help you design and implement your blended learning strategies effectively, and give you everything you need to help others develop and grow.

What is Blended Learning & Training?

As online learning grows more popular, more educators are focused on the same goal: developing strategies to maximize its effectiveness for students and employees.

Blended learning, a model borne out of these efforts, offers a combination of face-to-face learning and dynamic digital activities and content that encourage development from anywhere, at any time.[1]

By complementing face-to-face and online delivery methods, blended training aims to enhance students’ experiences of their learning environments, while giving them convenient and more flexible access to developmental resources.

The ultimate goal of blended learning is to enhance the way that learners approach study and training.

Using online tools, cleverly designed course elements, and student engagement, its aim is to provide an experience that will improve learners’ outcomes.[2]

5 Benefits of Blended Learning

Many organizations have embraced online and blended training models over the past ten years, precisely because it offers so many advantages.

Blended learning provides an interactive development experience that can be highly engaging – and motivated, active learners are what drives successful learning.

In addition to its ease of access, a few more blended learning benefits include:

1. Lower costs of delivery: It’s much more affordable for educators to share and personalize online materials than paper-based resources, especially at scale
2. It uses data-driven insights to inform curricula: Blended learning teachers or trainers can use live results or feedback to refine their programs, while students can discuss and collaborate to maximize their learning
3. Meeting a diverse array of learner needs: E-learning encompasses a massive range of different modalities, such as video-based lessons, audio lectures, images, and other multimedia, giving educators endless opportunities to customize and personalize learning content
4. It has a much broader reach: Blended learning is time- and location-independent, allowing organizations and schools to reach learners globally (it’s also much easier to translate content for multilingual classes), and
5. Blended learning is engaging: When blended learning best practices are followed, educators can easily encourage successful learning with a plethora of potential interactive, engaging, and motivational course designs.[3]

Student Engagement & Blended Learning

Most critically, blended learning provides an interactive development experience that can be highly engaging, and motivated, active learners are what drives successful learning.

With blended strategies, students can not only choose the type of content they prefer to learn from, e.g. video, audio, images, or text, but they can also reinforce their learning in practice, through online quizzes, assessments, and exercises.

By facilitating easy student-instructor and learner-learner communication at any time, blended learning also ensures everyone is kept up-to-date on each other’s progress while highlighting where more attention is needed.

7 Strategies For Your Online Courses

So, plenty of studies have highlighted the important role of student engagement when it comes to the effectiveness of a blended learning model.

But when it comes to creating a learner engagement strategy, where do you begin?

Researchers Chickering and Gamson’s Seven Principles for best practice suggest that a blended learning model should:[4]

1. Encourage contact between students and faculty members (or trainers) – both during and outside of classes
2. Encourage students to cooperate with one another – by creating a social, collaborative online learning environment
3. Facilitate active learning – by inviting students to write about and discuss their learnings, while applying their knowledge in daily life
4. Allow for prompt feedback – to identify areas for improvement and focus learning
5. Emphasize time on task – by allocating realistic amounts of time for worksheets, e-modules, or specific lessons
6. Communicate high expectations – e.g. with check-ins or goal-setting, and
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning – e.g. through self-paced learning or personalized coaching programs.

By considering these principles while you plan the different elements and structure of your online course, you can create an engaging learning experience that enhances your students’ ability to learn.

Using Quenza’s app for coaches, we’ll show you some practical examples in the sections that follow.

What is the Best Learning Platform Solution?

Blended learning solutions vary in terms of the tools they offer, which will ultimately govern how you design your course.

While a mixed bag of standalone tools can help you with various elements of your curricula design and delivery, it’s generally best to find an all-in-one blended learning platform that will cover all of your needs.

Quenza’s cutting-edge digital toolkit gives you everything you need from online learning software, allowing you to design, build, and deliver your blended training solutions easily while staying on top of your programs as they roll out.

How To Use Quenza’s Digital Tools

Using our blended learning strategies as a guide, you can use Quenza’s digital tools to develop engaging e-course content from existing hard-copy resources you might want to digitalize.

You can facilitate active learning, for example, by creating interactive worksheets or forms with Quenza’s drag-and-drop Activity Builder tools:

Your Activity Builder tools include a host of fields like short-answer, drop down, and text box question formats that you can drop into blank Activity templates to craft different curricula elements.

You might want to build questionnaires, surveys, or meditations, to name a few, to cover a diverse range of learning styles.

Quenza’s live results tracker will automatically collect your learners’ responses, and keep you up-to-date on their progress:

To get an individual overview of each students’ engagement levels, simply head to your Client tab to view all their updates and activity, plus all their chat logs with you.

From your centralized platform, you can also deliver prompt feedback on Quenza’s live and HIPAA-compliant chat:

Quenza Chat, shown above, is perfect for giving timely feedback on your students’ progress or any key focus areas you spot.

Finally, you can use Quenza to curate all your blended learning resources into structured Pathways such as e-courses, workshops, or training programs.

By assigning them as steps in your Pathways Tool, as shown, you can organize all your Activities into seamless and automatically delivered curricula.

Your Pathways Tool even allows you to select custom intervals between steps, personalizing your different students’ Pathways to suit their pace, and allocate a realistic time frame for each task.

In short, Quenza’s easy-to-use tools can help you apply blended learning best practices to boost your students’ learning. By giving you everything you need to craft engaging content, deliver prompt feedback, and connect with students outside of class, you can enhance others’ learning experiences for even more successful outcomes.

3 Example Activities, Questions & Questionnaires For Your Course

Quenza also gives you a brilliant head-start on curricula development by enabling you to use coaching templates or pre-made lessons in your courses.

Simply head over to your free in-app Expansion Library to browse dozens of ready-to-go metaphors, activities, worksheets, assessments, and blended learning questionnaires.

A small sample of Quenza’s practical e-learning activities include:

1. The Best Possible Self Exercise – This Expansion helps students build optimism by imagining an ideal future. This Expansion can be customized or sent as-is to both individual students and entire classes.
2. Quenza’s Beyond Limitations Question Technique – Here’s a multi-purpose coaching exercise that students can use to explore their core values, and
3. The 20 Guidelines for Developing a Growth Mindset lesson, a customizable Expansion that lays out 20 principles for cultivating a healthy, adaptive approach to development.

Best Practices & Considerations

With the right attention to blended learning best practices, it’s possible to customize your curricula to craft the ideal development experience for each client.

Quenza makes it easy for you to design, build, and save templates for each program you want to offer, meaning you can easily personalize saved copies of your signature coaching programs or curricula for different learners.

You can adapt your course for different time considerations, offer interactive learning approaches, and even personalize your images to meet different students’ preferences, but at the end of the day it all comes down to engagement.

With Quenza’s specialized e-learning tools, that’s as easy to maintain as it is to build. Give it a go!

Final Thoughts

Blended learning can lead to greatly enhanced student outcomes while giving you and your learners greater flexibility about the ‘how’ of their development.

If you’re new to combining traditional and online education techniques, use Quenza’s toolkit to apply these strategies, and you’ll soon uncover some amazing ways to encourage autonomy and reflection in your students for even more engaging learning.

We hope this article helped you. Don’t forget to try Quenza’s blended learning tools for $1 and start implementing your strategies today.

Our online learning software contains everything you need to share seamless learning journeys with others, so that you can maximize their development easily online.

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