DEVELOPING ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES IN THE BLENDED LEARNING TRIANGLE: THE CASE OF I&E EDUCATION IN THE EIT DIGITAL

Digitalised education is already a consolidated practice in Higher Education. Budget constraints and the need to target larger students cohorts show the benefit of leveraging educational content without increasing delivery costs. However, if on the one hand this “economy of scale” based rationale is the main foundation of the digitalised education narrative, on the other, such a view clashes with the need to address a series of novel social dynamics which are enacted by technological mediation. This claim is rooted in a change of focus from just economies of scale to that of scope. When knowledge sources are diverse, fast-changing and interconnected, Blended Learning (BL) offers an opportunity to provide learners with a wide mix of contents which can be hardly owned by a single knowledge provider. However, in BL, the online part tends to drive its main value proposition, which turns out to be based on an efficiency-based view. On the other hand, positioning ICT as a means to produce complex educational content delivered to students interactively by trainers, transforms the traditional learner/trainer relationship into a three-dimensional learning environment made of content producers (CPs), class trainers (CTs) and learners (CLs), here referred to as the Blended Learning Triangle (BLT). In this contribution we claim that these actors are traditionally seen as, somehow, disjoint. The question is whether such an interactional independence can be effective when dealing with complex knowledges instead of requiring a deeper engagement between them. This implies a problematization of the BLT, whereby these actors need to interact, cooperate and, plausibly, handle conflicts over demands of flexibility, adaptability and knowledge absorption capacity. This paper explores issues related to this problematization and, relying on experiences developed in the context of the EIT Digital, a pan-european network of HEIs, suggests possible recommendations to address these novel interactional demands.