Supporting Blended Learners in the New Normal

Due to COVID-19, university teachers globally have suddenly been required to adapt to teach through blended learning, with increased online activities. Indications are that blended learning will continue to be prominent post-COVID and become the ‘new norm’ with respect to higher education. Due to the limited experience of online or blended learning prior to COVID-19, teachers and universities commonly modelled their blended teaching on the form of teaching they were familiar with—their on-campus teaching, Historically, the 50-min lecture, the core of on-campus teaching, was the principal activity of blended teaching. When delivering content online, however, this lecture format had to be re-imagined. The model derived in Chap. 14, establishes that for the support in an online environment to be optimised, four equally important pedagogical elements need to be present, and of high quality. This chapter, therefore, presents a case study of a blended learning, introductory-level, anatomy and physiology course taught by award-winning teachers using a flipped classroom model. All four pedagogical elements in this course were of high quality and involved integration between online components and face-to-face classes. Each of the four elements is illustrated in sufficient detail to provide a model for other teachers to follow in adapting to blended learning using a flipped classroom approach. The illustrations of the pedagogical elements draw on examples from the learning management system (LMS), face-to-face classes, synchronous and asynchronous activities and student feedback (please note that in some student feedback, students refer to a unit which is the nomenclature used for a subject at our institution).