Blended, not stirred: the art of getting high quality blended learning for half the price, or less

While advocates of blended learning unfailingly promise better learning, they also readily acknowledge that the online material needed is expensive and time-consuming to produce. One rather intuitive solution would be to use pre-existing online material to reap the benefits of blended learning at a discount. This would also serve to maximise the use-value of material already produced.

This paper presents the work and outcomes of Blending Swedish, a Nordplus project jointly conducted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the University of Iceland, and Aalto University. The project had as focus the newest, most modern large open online course in Swedish, Learning Swedish (LS) - a course that in November 2017 had more than 100,000 registered users after barely two years online.

The project intended to find ways to flexibly and efficiently integrate LS - a self-paced course, with no teacher support, and no feedback on oral or written production - into mixed learning environments, based on research and proven experience. The aim was to support the teaching of beginners' Swedish inside and outside the Nordic region, help teachers interested in e-learning, and increase the efficiency of the already developed online course by suggesting improvements.

The most tangible outcome of the project is a teacher's manual complete with exercises complementing the online course, but the paper will not dwell into the details of this specific course as much as try to identify the general strategies for creating blended learning on the cheap, and discuss the questions that such an approach gives rise to.