Lucky readers: you get a bonus! This is really a brief summary of all of the ten previous posts on this topic, which constitute Chapter 10 of my online open textbook, Teaching in a Digital Age:

• Deciding on modes of delivery
• Challenging the supremacy of face-to-face teaching
• Mode of delivery: Learners as a determining factor
• Desperately seeking the unique pedagogical characteristics of face-to-face teaching
• Nine questions to ask when choosing modes of delivery
• What do we mean by ‘open’ in education?
• Making sense of open educational resources
• Integrating open textbooks, open research and open data into teaching
• The implications of ‘open’ for course and program design: towards a paradigm shift
• A future vision for OER and online learning 

Key takeaways

1. There is a continuum of technology-based learning, from ‘pure’ face-to-face teaching to fully online programs. Every teacher or instructor needs to decide where on the continuum a particular course or program should be.

2. We do not have good research evidence or theories to make this decision, although we do have growing experience of the strengths and limitations of online learning. What is particularly missing is an evidence-based analysis of the strengths and limitations of face-to-face teaching when online learning is also available.

3. In the absence of good theory, I have suggested four factors to consider when deciding on mode of delivery, and in particular the different uses of face-to-face and online learning in blended courses:

• your preferred teaching strategy, in terms of methods and learning outcomes
• student characteristics and needs
• the pedagogical and presentational requirements of the subject matter, in terms of (a) content and (b) skills
• the resources available to an instructor (including the instructor’s time).

4. The move to blended or hybrid learning in particular means rethinking the use of the campus and the facilities needed fully to support learning in a hybrid mode.

5. Open educational resources offer many benefits but they need to be well designed and embedded within a rich learning environment to be effective.

6. The increasing availability of OER, open textbooks, open research and open data means that in future, almost all academic content will be open and freely accessible over the Internet.

7. As a result, students will increasingly look to institutions for learning support and help with the development of skills needed in a digital age rather than with the delivery of content. This will have major consequences for the role of teachers/instructors and the design of courses.

8. OER and other forms of open education will lead to increased modularization and disaggregation of learning services, which are needed to respond to the increasing diversity of learner needs in a digital age.

9. MOOCs are essentially a dead end with regard to providing learners who do not have adequate access to education with high quality qualifications. The main value of MOOCs is in providing opportunities for non-formal education and supporting communities of practice.

10. OER, MOOCs, open textbooks and other digital forms of open-ness are important in helping to widen access to learning opportunities, but ultimately these are enhancements rather than a replacement for a well-funded public education system, which remains the core foundation for enabling equal access to educational opportunities.

Next

Chapter 10 on Modes of Delivery and Open Education is now published.

Chapter 11 will be on design strategies for ensuring high quality learning. Since it is based on an earlier series of blog posts called Nine steps to quality online learning, I will not be publishing blog posts on the book version. This should be ready by the end of next week.

I will however publish blog posts on Chapter 12, the concluding chapter, as I develop it. Chapter 12 will discuss issues around faculty development/training, institutional strategies for teaching and learning, and likely developments for teaching and learning in the near future. (Any other suggestions for topics for this last chapter will be much appreciated, as I need to focus on key issues that have wide interest that have not been covered elsewhere in the book.)

I will also start returning gradually to reviewing new developments, research articles, conferences, etc., as before I started on the open textbook project.