Adult Learners’ Sense-Making in Blended Learning Environments: Healthcare and Workplace Safety and Health (WSH)

Abstract

Sense-making is understood as finding a way of thinking about diversity, complexity, uncertainties, ambiguities and incompleteness (Dervin B, J Knowl Manage 2:1–11, 1998). Building on Dervin’s early work, educational (e.g., Harverly, Barton, Schwarz & Braaten, 2018) and organization studies (Weick K, Sense-making in organizations. Sage, Thousand Oaks, 1995; Weick KE, Sutcliffe KM, Obstfeld D, Organ Sci 16:409–421, 2005) argue that sense-making is a sociocultural and cognitive process by which students/teachers/workers in educational or organizational settings interactively and dialogically make meanings and plausible explanations of their collective experiences of uncertainties or ambiguities. This chapter explores how different sense-making features are distributed for individuals in two different blended learning courses. Additionally, I examine the impact of mediating factors, such as context, design and delivery of courses, on these learners’ sense-making experiences in blended learning. The ethnographic study (Bi, Bound, Mohamed, Cai & Chuen, 2020) of six different courses by different training providers, which this Chapter refers to, was conducted in Singapore to investigate how adult learners experience and translate sense-making across different blended environments.KeywordsSense-makingBlended learningCurriculum design and deliveryMediators