Blended learning in vocational education: teachers’ conceptions of blended learning and their approaches to teaching and design

Abstract

This paper presents research exploring teachers’ experiences of using blended learning in vocational education. Teachers involved in designing and teaching using blended learning from a major Australian vocational education provider participated in the study. They received open-ended questionnaires asking to describe their conceptions of blended learning and their approaches to teaching and design for blended learning environments. Teachers’ responses were content-analysed from a phenomenographic perspective. Their descriptions illustrate a relatively wide spectrum of ideas about the nature of blended learning, suggesting that teachers tend to have qualitatively different conceptions about blended learning, and tend to adopt qualitatively different approaches to both teaching and design for blended learning. Quantitative analyses investigating possible relationships between teachers’ conceptions and approaches were also conducted. Implications of the findings for further research and practice are discussed.