Teaching in Blended Learning Environments: Creating and Sustaining Communities of Inquiry

Abstract

Today’s learners are digital natives, who “enjoy browsing and surfing the Internet, who navigate in hypertexts, who like to talk to fellow students in chat rooms, who learn by permanently interacting with certain teaching softwares, who communicate by means of email… who discuss scientific problems asynchronously in virtual seminars or synchronously through video conferencing, who co-operate via groupware, who listen to a lecture delivered by an eminent scholar at another university (Remote lecture room), who search, find and download interesting and needed programmes, … who immerse themselves even into simulated virtual reality to perform special learning tasks”