Be yourself, blend yourself!

The topic of today is “blended learning”.

Task 1

Read the information below to get the general idea:

It seems that HR departments in many companies are at present suffering from real pangs of conscience when they have to decide about their employee benefits packages. Since the choice is wide, ranging from health care, life insurance, training schemes, child care, vacation leaves to fitness, stress management programs or retirement plans, employers need to bear in mind what the most suitable solution would be for each individual within a particular work group.

One of the most frequently considered options are foreign language courses. These may come in various forms, depending on specific needs analyses, inborn abilities of future learners, individual skills and preferences of potential students, job requirements or, merely, personal interests of would-be-participants. Considering such diversified matters, HR managers can nowadays select from a multitude of course types, ranging from old-fashioned to very high-tech ones, such as: in-company trainings, B2B, traditional individual/group courses, OTO, general or special purpose on-line courses, tailor-made vocation courses, virtual classes, not to mention blended learning solutions.

However, to make appropriate choices, one needs to grasp at least basic understanding of peculiarities of each of them. Although you may be more familiar with traditional approaches, like one-to-one or group meetings, or in-company trainings, and more accustomed to e-learning or online teaching methods, but still the idea of blended learning might be less known to at least some of you.

So, we will start with scrutinizing this particularly modern concept of mixed teaching aids and materials, called “blended learning”.