Resumen de Blended learning beyond borders; the good, the bad and the ugly
The ’Council for At Risk Academics (CARA) is a European charity that was set up to addressthe risks posed to academics in life-threatening contexts; often those whom are living and working inconflict zones or whom have been displaced from their homelands due to war. CARA administers anumber of programmes in conjunction with support from key higher education and professional bodies;working with displaced academics across the world. This English for Academic Purposes (EAP)and study skills project was principally setup in order to facilitate the continuation of the academiclives of Syrian academics displaced to Turkey through enabling them to engage with academic opportunity.The students selected for this programme are busy academics from a variety of different disciplinesand are usually in full time employment at their respective higher education institutions. Theproject takes a blended-learning approach (Breen, 2018) to delivery with the majority of teaching takingplace online via an online classroom with periodical intensive in country face-face teaching taking placeevery three months or so. This paper focuses principally on the critical reflections of a blended-learningpractitioner for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) of a low-level displaced Syrian lecturer in Educationwith some student reflections, one year into the programme. Student and practitioner longitudinalethnographic reflective data was collected over a five-month span. Data was qualitatively analysed usinga priori method for three key themes pertaining to; positive experiences to teaching and learning,key challenges from both teacher and student perspectives and lastly key areas of improvement and redesignneeded to better facilitate the key learning outcomes of the project in terms of student engagementwith the academy. Results have shown that more dynamic teaching pedagogies such as ‘flippedlearning’ allow for greater use of online face-face- time with lessons spanning over two time zones(GMT and EEST) and furthermore, allow for greater processing time sometimes needed with low-levellanguage learners. It is hoped that this reflective study will facilitate meaningful discussion amongstcolleagues to bring together dynamic ideas of enhancing blended learning programmes in order to facilitatefurther student and teacher engagement in this emerging teaching and learning space.
