HE-C04 — Digital and Blended Learning

Course Code: HE-C04  |  School: School of Higher Education  |  Cluster: Level 2 — Curriculum and Teaching Practice

Level: Intermediate  |  Duration: 6 weeks · 24–30 learning hours  |  Language: English  |  Certificate: Professional Certificate (non-degree)  |  Format: Self-paced with AI support under human supervision

Overview

Most institutional digital learning is the analogue course photographed and posted. Lectures are recorded, readings are uploaded, the discussion forum stays empty, and everyone concludes that online study is inferior. The conclusion does not follow from the evidence; it follows from the design.

This course teaches digital and blended learning as a distinct design problem rather than a delivery channel. It covers the decision of what belongs synchronously and what does not, the construction of asynchronous material that sustains attention and produces work, the cultivation of social and teaching presence at a distance, assessment and academic integrity in distributed settings, accessibility, and the honest evaluation of platform data.

The course is sceptical of technology enthusiasm. Tools are examined for what they add against their cost in staff time, student attention and institutional dependence, and learning analytics are treated as weak proxies that measure activity rather than learning. What is taught is a design method that survives changes of platform. Learners produce a fully specified blended or online unit ready to run.

Learning outcomes

On completion, a successful learner will be able to:

1. Decide, with a stated rationale, which learning activities require synchronous interaction and which are better asynchronous.
2. Design asynchronous material that segments content, embeds retrieval and produces observable student work rather than passive consumption.
3. Establish social, cognitive and teaching presence in a distributed cohort, and specify the moderation practices that sustain them.
4. Design assessment appropriate to distributed settings, addressing integrity through task design rather than primarily through proctoring.
5. Apply accessibility standards to digital materials and platforms, and test compliance rather than assume it.
6. Interpret learning analytics and engagement data with an accurate understanding of what they measure and the ethical limits of their use.
7. Specify a complete blended or online unit, including workload estimates for both students and staff.

Who this course is for

The course suits academics designing or converting units for online or blended delivery, learning designers and educational technologists, programme leaders planning flexible provision, and institutional staff responsible for digital learning strategy. No technical background is required.

Prerequisites

Completion of HE-F03 or equivalent teaching experience, and access to the institutional learning platform for a unit the learner will design. Familiarity with basic platform functions is helpful but not required.

Syllabus

Module 1 — What belongs online, and what does not

The module establishes the design decision that governs everything else. It examines the affordances of synchronous and asynchronous modes, the activities for which each is genuinely superior, the evidence on comparative effectiveness, and the false economy of recording lectures as the default response to a demand for flexibility.

Lessons. 1.1 Affordances of each mode. 1.2 What synchronous time is for. 1.3 The comparative evidence. 1.4 Auditing a converted unit for mode mismatch.

Deliverable. Diagnostic note (800 words) allocating an existing unit’s activities across modes with justification.

Module 2 — Designing asynchronous learning

This module builds the asynchronous core. It covers segmentation and realistic attention spans, multimedia design principles including the coherence and redundancy effects, embedded retrieval practice, guided reading with accountability, and the design of activities that generate visible student work the teacher can respond to.

Lessons. 2.1 Segmentation and cognitive load online. 2.2 Multimedia design principles. 2.3 Embedded retrieval and self-testing. 2.4 Activities that produce visible work.

Deliverable. Analytical brief (1,000 words) specifying an asynchronous learning sequence.

Module 3 — Presence, community and moderation

The module addresses the central failure of online provision: isolation. It covers the community of inquiry framework and its three presences, discussion design that produces argument rather than compliance posts, moderation practice and response norms, cohort formation, and the specific difficulties of sustaining presence in very large or very dispersed groups.

Lessons. 3.1 Social, cognitive and teaching presence. 3.2 Discussion design and prompts that work. 3.3 Moderation norms and response time. 3.4 Cohort formation at distance.

Deliverable. Design artefact: an interaction and moderation plan with prompts and norms.

Module 4 — Assessment and integrity at a distance

This module covers assessment in distributed settings: authentic and process-based tasks, oral verification, submission provenance, the case against heavy reliance on remote proctoring including its documented equity and privacy problems, and the design of tasks whose validity does not depend on controlling the student’s environment.

Lessons. 4.1 Task types that travel. 4.2 Oral verification at scale. 4.3 Remote proctoring: costs, harms and alternatives. 4.4 Integrity through design.

Deliverable. Evaluation report (1,000 words) assessing an online assessment regime for validity and equity.

Module 5 — Accessibility and inclusive digital design

The module treats accessibility as a requirement rather than an accommodation. It covers the relevant standards, captioning and transcripts, document and slide structure, colour and contrast, keyboard navigability, platform limitations, and the additional considerations of low-bandwidth and mobile-only access common across much of the region.

Lessons. 5.1 Standards and legal obligations. 5.2 Captions, transcripts and document structure. 5.3 Testing rather than assuming compliance. 5.4 Low-bandwidth and mobile-first design.

Deliverable. Implementation plan (1,000 words): an accessibility audit and remediation schedule.

Module 6 — Data, evaluation and sustainability

The final module addresses evidence and cost. It covers what platform analytics actually measure and their weak relationship to learning, the ethics and governance of student data, evaluation designs suited to online units, and the sustainability question of staff workload, maintenance and institutional dependence on commercial platforms.

Lessons. 6.1 What analytics measure and miss. 6.2 Student data ethics and governance. 6.3 Evaluating an online unit. 6.4 Workload, maintenance and vendor dependence.

Deliverable. Final capstone: complete unit specification (3,000 words) with workload and evaluation plan.

Assessment

Pass mark 70 per cent. All assessed components must be attempted. Every mark in this course is issued by a human assessor; no assessment outcome is generated automatically.

Rubric criteria

Each assessed artefact is marked against four criteria at four levels (distinction, pass with merit, pass, fail).

1. Mode rationale. Whether the allocation of activities to synchronous and asynchronous modes is argued from the properties of the activity rather than from convenience.
2. Design quality. Whether asynchronous material segments appropriately, embeds retrieval, and produces observable student work rather than passive consumption.
3. Inclusion and accessibility. Whether accessibility is tested against standards and whether bandwidth, device and language constraints are addressed concretely.
4. Sustainability. Whether staff workload for delivery and maintenance is estimated realistically and whether platform dependence is acknowledged.

Reading list

Core. D. Randy Garrison, Terry Anderson & Walter Archer, ‘Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education’, The Internet and Higher Education, 2:2–3 (1999), pp. 87–105.

Richard E. Mayer, Multimedia Learning, 3rd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Gilly Salmon, E-tivities: The Key to Active Online Learning, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2013).

Barbara Means, Marianne Bakia & Robert Murphy, Learning Online: What Research Tells Us about Whether, When and How (New York: Routledge, 2014).

World Wide Web Consortium, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 (W3C Recommendation, 2023).

Neil Selwyn, Is Technology Good for Education? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).

Academic integrity and use of AI

AI tools may be used in this course for locating literature, organising evidence, drafting non-analytical sections and criticising the learner’s own work. They may not be used to generate the analysis, the evaluation or the recommendation. Every submission carries a use-of-AI statement naming the tools used and the purpose of each use.

All citations must be verified against the primary source, and institutional facts — regulations, standards, accreditation criteria, published data — must be cited to the issuing body. Fabricated references and invented statistics result in failure and referral. Where learners write about their own institution they must not disclose confidential personnel or student data, and illustrative cases must be anonymised.