Many Universities offer today the opportunity of e-learning courses in order to support graduate students’ special learning needs and demands. An innovative approach to cope with the problems of such online courses is the capability to attend blended learning ones. So, we designed and incorporated e-learning activities with a traditional graduate course and recorded the students’ reactions, which helped us to study the possibility of implementing a blended learning model into our University's graduate program. Our research indicates that there are benefits and drawbacks to this approach, but the main parameters which strengthen the effective educational design are the organization of the learning activities that have conceivable educational goal and the implementation of the students’ suggestions into the design of the blended model. We hope that the conclusions of this study can be useful for further improving the development of such a model of blended learning.
Information and Communication Technologies, Blended Learning in higher education, Backward Design, Action Research
