How to Mix the Ingredients for a Blended Course Recipe

Abstract

Over the last years, the growing ubiquity of Social Media, the emerging mobile technologies and the augmented reality become more deeply integrated into the teaching-learning process and also create new opportunities for reinventing the way in which educational actors both perceive and access learning. The major challenges in education that involve tremendous development and innovation are blended courses/ flipped classrooms integrating Social Media (SM), Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) (Johnson et al., 2014). This paper focuses on evaluating the e-learning experiences of various actors in the Romanian educational system. There is a tendency to use virtual learning environments with increasing frequency in higher education, many participants experiencing both online and blended courses. Another issue approached in this paper concerns the relevance of the components of online/ blended courses. In this context, the paper analyzes the importance of these elements with respect to various fields, such as: exact sciences, social sciences, humanistic studies, medical sciences, etc. In conclusion, we identify the most relevant elements in the development of online/ blended courses for various domains. The results will emphasize the standards required for evaluating the quality of online and blended courses.