Blending Learning: Our Country’s Best Resort for Quality Education

Dante U. Bangug

Critical changes in classrooms have been a significant concern today and age as the trying times emerged out of nowhere. As the pandemic raises global awareness, plenty of proposals for academic continuation has been suggested since educational institutions fear the threat of academic freeze in the country.

As the Philippines suffer from different difficulties, the educational system has initiated to calibrate their approach according to the events that are actively happening in the world. Teachers who are forced to grab the new normal in the classroom quickly take advantage of their old and traditional teaching methods amalgamated with modern technology (Lynch, 2018). From papers and pencils to gadgets and internet connections, classrooms are slowly adjusting to the environment, resulting in the mass adaption of new methods of allocating knowledge and wisdom to the forthcoming generations.

In layman’s terms, blended learning is the combination and adaptation of two different training systems – the traditional face-to-face, which is the most convenient way of schooling, and the high-tech e-learning, which is known to be the best alternative for its traditional counterpart in schooling (ELM Learning, 2020).

Blended learning can lift and suggest a win-win situation, giving its beneficiaries a two-way prospect in growing. A great number of possibilities and ideas open and surface from fusing both well-practiced schooling methods for better sufficiency and efficiency in both learning and teaching which benefits both teachers and students.

In the Philippines, blended learning is deemed to be its educational system’s most recommended refuge in rescuing the schooling throughout the archipelago and save the students and teachers from suffering the threats of academic freeze. Blended learning showcases its efficiency by providing its users the needed resources in the field of acquiring knowledge.

The combination of papers and gadgets brings out the potential of both ends with minimum expenses. As teachers and students continue to be immersed with blended learning, engagement inside the discussion is drastically lifted due to better communication between two parties and controlled paced of both obtaining knowledge and mastery and allocating information inside the classroom. Flexible accessibility is also known to be a benefit as teachers and students can easily be resilient in situations that are bound to happen in the future.

Being online and at the same time given the materials needed for the discussion, blended learning can be executed anytime and anywhere (Bright, 2015). Plenty of good backfires can be enjoyed while enforcing the ideas and concepts of blended learning in the classroom resulting in a just, holistic, and systematic approach in the new normal modern classroom.

To sum up, blended learning is a good haven to ensure the stability and safety of both teaching and learning concepts. However, there are known pitfalls that can pose a threat in the future; blended learning proves its worth to be the most recommended type of schooling approach inside the pandemic’s scare.

--oOo-The author is Master Teacher I at Cabagan Science Elementary School, Division of Isabela, Region II.