Teachers' Role in Blended Learning : The Emperor's new Clothes?

From a theoretical perspective, this paper problematizes the future role of teachers in higher education, especially in the Swedish context, placing opportunities and raised challenges by blended learning in a historical context of distance education. Distance education was introduced in the late 19th century and has been offered by two main actors in Sweden: the correspondence school Hermods and universities. It has been viewed as a part of life-long learning, a concept introduced in the 1960s. The correspondence schools offered elementary education courses, and in-service training for various professions, while universities largely focused on higher education but also provided education or training commissioned by other organizations. Recently, the teaching requirements and role of the teacher in distance education have changed dramatically, from formulating exercises and commenting on students' work to giving videotaped lectures in English for an open audience. However, there is still a lack of appropriate guidance for teachers on effective pedagogical practice in the new settings. Specifically, there is an increasing need to support teachers in designing and creating effective videotaped lectures that are accessible for a dispersed audience. The TED talks seem to provide a role model for performance as a lecturer, but the average teacher hardly has time to both prepare regular face-to-face lectures and distance lectures, e.g. extensively rehearse before recording. The paper discusses how the challenges of future roles of teachers can be met when lecturing in front of a camera.