Designing a learning module for a blended course

Hi folks, this presentation suggests a method of designing a learning module for a blended course.

To design a learning module, we recommend that you use the approach of “backwards design,” a phrase made famous by Wiggins and McTighe in their seminal work, Understanding by Design.

This approach for designing a blended course module is relatively straightforward. First of all, you decide what you want your students to be able to do (not just “know” or “learn”!) when the module has been completed. Second, you decide what sort of data would persuade or demonstrate to you that the students can in fact do what you want them to. Third, you devise a learning activity that will produce the data you are looking for.

There are two underlying imperatives of blended course design that you should address in each course module. First, does the module contribute to the creation of an online learning community that is comparable to the face-to-face learning community of your classroom? Second, have you integrated the work that is to be completed online with the face-to-face work of the course both prior to and subsequent to the online portion of the module?

The example that I’m going to use is drawn from an upper-level course on the Anthropology of Religion that I taught in blended format in Fall 2004.

The learning objectives of the module are fairly complex, since the course is an upper-level course that includes both graduate and undergraduate students. The basic issue, however, is fairly clear: are religions culturally shaped, or are religions always experienced authentically, precisely as they were given by tradition or divine intervention? This issue is hard for students to grasp, since many of them who are deeply religious are quite prepared to argue that their own religion is authentic, while someone else’s religion is culturally shaped.

A second issue that is closely related can be stated this way: if indeed religions are culturally shaped, then they are likely to be “syncretic,” which means that elements of several religions have been combined to create an entirely new religion that never existed previously. For instance, most scholars argue that Christianity (as well as Islam, and every other religion) is the product of a cultural accretion by which festivals, rituals, and doctrines were included as it became convenient or politically essential to do so. Here again, a challenge to students is to identify the syncretic construction of their own beliefs, when in fact most are predisposed to claim that their religion was “received” as an integral whole.

With this background, I note that the approach to the students’ learning module is indirect. I show two short videos in the face-to-face classroom, one on the controversy surrounding Chief Illiniwek, the former (and perhaps future) mascot of the University of Illinois, and the other on the way in which Neopagans have borrowed cultural elements from Native Americans (as well as other cultures) to construct their own religious beliefs and practices.

The question that is posed in the initial face-to-face portion of this learning module is “who owns a religious practice.” I first address this question face-to-face because it encourages students’ visceral reaction after the videos have been viewed. They are inclined to side with Native Americans who feel that their culture has been despoiled by opportunistic whites.

The online portion of the learning module arises directly from the face-to-face viewing of the videos and the ensuing class discussion. The students are reading a case study of Neopagans, some of whom enthusiastically embrace what they take to be Native American religion as if it were their own. I have actually digitized clips from the videos to support their reading of the case study and to remind them of our face-to-face discussion.

Can religion still be authentically experienced if it is culturally assembled? I ask the students to consider the arguments for and against this adoption of Native American beliefs, sometimes derogatorily referred to as “cultural strip-mining,” and to determine which position they find the more persuasive, and why. The students are required to reference their case study and the videos specifically to support their position.

At this stage, please note that the students are still comfortably debating the pros and cons of someone else’s religion, so the issue has not yet become wholly problematic for them. The students must then post approximately 350 words to the discussion forum of the course Website. The textual nature of the posting contrasts with the more spontaneous class discussion that has preceded it, so the students achieve a little emotional distance on the matter at hand.

The next phase of the module involves an additional online posting in which the students must respond to someone else with whom they do not entirely agree, and explain the basis for their disagreement. This posting is shorter, about 150-200 words, but must again refer to specific examples drawn from the Neopagan ethnography and the videos.

The final phase of the learning module returns us to the face-to-face classroom, equipped with the initial face-to-face discussion and the subsequent online postings and responses. I give each of the students a hardcopy of her/his initial posting, partly for an aide-memoire and partly to make them feel more secure for the discussion that will ensue.

Then I have the students count off to divide themselves randomly into groups, and I give each group a question to answer. The questions are focused on the early history of Christianity, and have been written to parallel the debate that just occurred during the online postings and responses.

Here are a couple of the questions:

  • The Jews claimed to “own” many if not all aspects of early Christianity, including the requirement that followers of Jesus must follow Jewish dietary laws and that males must be circumcised. Pretend that you are an early Christian; what is your answer?
  • Most scholars agree that if the shepherds were out watching their flocks by night when Jesus was born, the month of his birth was not December. In fact, the early Christian church deliberately chose December as the celebration of Jesus’ birth because it coincided with the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. Remember that many modern Christians refuse to celebrate Hallowe’en because they argue it is a pagan holiday. Does this mean that for modern Christians, Christmas should not be celebrated?
  • Muslims have argued that since Christians believe that Jesus was not merely human, but effectively a god himself, that makes Christians polytheists. By contrast, Muslims believe that both Jesus and Mohammad were humans (though great prophets nonetheless). Most scholars believe that it was not in fact blasphemous in Jesus’ time for a spiritual leader to declare himself to be the “son of god,” as Jesus did. So from the viewpoint of modern Christians, does it matter if Christians believe in more than one god? Would it matter if Christians believed that Jesus was only human instead?

As you can see, these questions build on and problematize the online discussion that has gone before, and bring into perspective the videos that the students have watched. By the end of this module many of the students have managed to distance themselves from their own beliefs sufficiently to interpret them more anthropologically.

Please note a couple of things here. First, the sequence of events – from face-to-face to online, back to face-to-face again – was critical to the success of the module. Each of the steps was necessary to make the next possible. Second, the face-to-face and online activities had to be integrated (I refer to this process as “closing the loop”) in order for the learning module to achieve its goals. Third, the students constituted themselves as a peer learning community both online and face-to-face, though in different ways, in response to my prompts. Finally, this learning module prepared the way for the next, since the topic we were shortly to take up was the issue of spiritual autobiographies, how people become believers, and I will be using a similar thematic tension between our case study of Neopaganism and the personal religious beliefs of members of the class to allow them to learn how to apply a standard anthropological model of religious conversion to their own circumstances.

I think that this example illustrates nicely an approach to building a blended learning module in one of the discursive disciplines such as anthropology. The fact that a blended course can use both face-to-face and blended modalities to allow the development of a peer learning community means that students can pursue higher-level learning and more reflective forms of inquiry than if the course were merely face-to-face.

Even more to the point, had I tacked on an online activity that was unrelated to what we were doing in the classroom, and taught the course as two parallel types of activities, the face-to-face and online portions of the course would not have influenced and elaborated one another, and the core effectiveness of a blended approach would not have been realized.

Finally, I note that there are other ways to develop blended learning modules that integrate face-to-face and online work, particularly in disciplines or courses where mastery of basic concepts is emphasized. For instance, in my introductory-level courses, I ask the students to take online quizzes to review and drill them on essential definitions and factual kinds of information.

Quizzes do not lend themselves, however, to the development of online learning community. In my own view, however, it is preferable wherever possible, even at the most introductory level of a discipline, to introduce its key questions and assumptions through online discussion. Thus it would be important, even in this instance, to complement the online quizzes with a discussion of the underlying significance of the material that is being tested, and to suggest the role that material plays in the scholarly forms of inquiry that are specific to a given discipline.

For additional information on blended teaching and learning, we invite you to visit the UW-Milwaukee blended/hybrid resource page at For questions about this program, and for individual questions directed to the staff of the UW – Milwaukee Learning Technology Center, please do not hesitate to get in touch via .