Enhancing Blended Learning – Developing a Community Based Methopedia

This paper will present some theoretical, methodological and technical discussions of the community based Methopedia wiki, which is under development, and will launch in its first incarnation September 2008. Methopedia is one activity within the EU-funded multilateral ICT project “Community of Integrated Blended Learning in Europe” (COMBLE), which is composed of partners from business, university and education. Methopedia is envisioned to be a community based wiki-system, combined with social networking features, where trainers and teachers from various sectors (vocational training, enterprises, universities, and public bodies) can consult, discuss, describe and share blended learning methods and methodologies. The aim of the COMBLE project and Methopedia is to contribute to leveraging the quality of education and training in Europe by engaging practitioners and researchers in developing, sharing and promoting innovative blended learning concepts and methods. To enable practitioners to share methods and learning designs an important task is to construct a shared, flexible pedagogical model/template for describing these. The model, which we outline in this paper, through discussing and synthesising literature within the field of learning design, needs to be further developed through theoretical and conceptual discussions. However, based on existing research, we argue that it is necessary that the model is developed through engaging the partner-network of trainers from business and education, and position them as co-creators of models and frameworks. We conclude the paper by discussing and outlining requirements and functionalities, some of which follow from the discussion of learning designs and blended learning, while others are related to the technical and socio-technical aspects of Methopedia.

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