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 UWMilwaukee blended/hybrid resource page at http://hybrid.uwm.edu. 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 LTC@uwm.edu.