Teaching academic skills using a blended model; How good is it really?

In September 2018, the University of Northampton, will move to a new campus. It will become a truly blended institute, with no lectures, just seminars and online learning. It has therefore become imperative that Northampton’s Learning Development introduces this model in to all our teaching practices before the move. This paper will examine two level 6 teaching sessions, delivered within the new blended model and analyse how effective they actually were for the students. It will also discuss the challenges of introducing blended learning to course lecturers, essentially managing their expectations of what Learning Development should be delivering. The paper will finally examine what areas need improvement for next year and how this can be achieved. While the skill taught were the same for both courses, critical analysis, the sessions were tailored to the courses specific requirements. One was for the Faculty of Business and Law, the other for the Faculty of Education and Humanities. Each of these course have over a hundred students enrolled on them, which created staff time issues when it came to delivering seminar sessions, that had to be addressed for the new model. For blended, both courses were set pre-sessional task, which were designed by Learning Development and set by the course lecturers on the university’s VLE. The research has been carried out using mixed methods. Feedback from both course lecturers and students was carried out, as well as an analysis of the grades. Ethical approval was obtained and all participants were anonymised.