Learning About Blended Learning Through Students' Experiences: An Exploratory Study in Postgraduate Guidance and Counselling Programs in a University With Campuses in Australia and Singapore

Introduction

Both the Ernst and Young’s “University of the Future” report (2012) and The New Media Consortium Horizon Higher Education report (2014) have recognised the digital age as a key driver in higher education institutions for twenty-first century learners. The emergent corollaries include: global mobility, the changing demographics of student candidates, the political and economic agenda making higher education more accessible and cost effective. These have coincided with a mushrooming availability of rapidly changing learning technologies. The upshot has been that technology-enhanced learning is more appealing to an increasingly diverse and more flexibility-demanding group of students within higher education (JISC, 2009; Shroff & Vogel, 2010).

The challenge is for teaching academics to implement programs that align with the demands of higher education institutions, which meet all the students’ diverse learning needs and which intelligently employ the ever-changing technology. The goal is to maximise student engagement in order to achieve the highest outcomes. For programs to be successful in the current learning environment, Jordan (2015) finds that there needs to be a clearly articulated vision. Evaluating the current learnscape is an imperative precursor.

The chapter commences with a wide-ranging review of the current literature on blended learning, including a focus on counsellor education. Blended learning is where face-to-face classes are complemented, or fused, with web-based, online learning materials (El-Mowafy, Kuhn, & Snow, 2013; Garrison & Vaughan, 2011; Keppell, Suddaby, & Hard, 2011; López-Pérez, Pérez-López, & Rodríguez-Ariza, 2011). The context and the methodology for the study is then introduced. Findings and discussion follows, including the translation of research learning into practice. The limitations of the study and future research concludes the chapter.