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Join the BlendKit Experience!

Written by cen-maneyer on . Posted in Announcement, blended, Event, Instructional Design, partnerships, teaching online.

BlendKit2017, the open, online course on blended learning design, combines a global cohort with value-add local interactions to provide a powerful professional development experience for those faculty and designers wishing to get started with or brush up on designing effective blended courses. The “local cohort option” (see video introduction) encourages the formation of face-to-face groups to provide mutual accountability and institutional contextualization for the more general global cohort experience. Past groups have reported that local sessions were extremely valuable in helping individuals apply blended learning design principles and successfully complete the global cohort. Groups can be as simple as occasional “coffee conversations” or as robust as full-blown institutionally incentivized faculty development programs.

Open SUNY COTE has partnered again this year with the BlendKit Team to facilitate and support the formation of two kinds of SUNY groups:

  1. local cohorts at participating SUNY campuses
  2. a virtual COTE-wide cohort at the system level
Local cohort at Buffalo State College getting ready for a BlendKit weekly webinar.
Local cohort at Buffalo State College getting ready for a BlendKit weekly webinar.

Individual faculty or designers interested in participating in a local cohort for BlendKit2017 should register through the COTE form: http://bit.ly/COTEblendkit2017. If you’re not sure whether a local cohort is being formed at your institution, contact Erin Maney to get connected (erin.maney@suny.edu). If you’re ready to champion a local cohort, register as a local cohort coordinator at http://bit.ly/COTEBlendKitcohorts to receive on-going communications/support.

BlendKit2017 is organized around the publicly-hosted, Creative Commons-licensed BlendKit Course Materials. In addition to the free course, EDUCAUSE and University of Central Florida (UCF) co-sponsor a portfolio-based “Certified Blended Learning Designer” certificate available to successful course completers.

Follow along with BlendKit2017 on Twitter using the hashtag #blendkit2017. For resources and communications on Twitter related to local cohorts, please see #blendkitlocal.

The creation of the BlendKit Course Materials, part of the Blended Learning Toolkit, was originally funded by a Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) grant awarded jointly to UCF and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) in 2011.

 

blended learning, blendkit, collaboration, COTE professional development, mooc, partnerships, PD, professional development, ucf