Reflections on Dr Mark Nicholls’ opening keynote, day two of FLANZ 2026, Dunedin
The second day of the FLANZ conference here in Dunedin opened with Dr Mark Nicholls, president of ICDE and a member of the Open Polytechnic, launching his new book, Blendagogy. Coming straight after the previous day’s keynote on recognition of prior learning and where learning actually resides, it’s had me thinking a lot about how the two perspectives ‘fit’ together. In this post I start with a summary of Mark’s presentation then follow with where I think the thinking needs to go next.
What is blended?
Mark began by pointing out that blended learning has been part of the higher education conversations for around thirty years now, and yet, despite faster networks, more storage and ubiquitous devices, the basic models look much as they did when he was building CD-ROM and HTML resources at Manawatu Polytechnic in 1997. His diagnosis is that we have never had a shared approach to describing or designing blended learning. He observed that “I do blended learning” tells you almost nothing, because the practice underneath that phrase varies enormously and sometimes contradicts itself.
He also made a point that is important for anyone in open, flexible and distance education to understand – the terminology (distance, online, HyFlex, bichronous) may differ, but all of these are essentially blended, and the old divide between distance and face-to-face has largely collapsed. That convergence is why he helped shift ICDE’s emphasis from “open and distance education” to inclusive, scalable and sustainable education.
On a personal note here, Mark’s comments about a ‘convergence’ taking place reminded me of the work I did around 20 years ago to describe the convergence I saw happening – taking us from discrete distance or physical schools, to a more networked and fully ‘merged’ system view of the education ecosystem illustrated above.
The framework: four objectives, six factors, three levels
Blendagogy is a project that grew out of Mark’s work as Commonwealth of Learning chair and a hui held at the National Library last year. It offers a comprehensive framework built on three elements as illustrated here – and explained below:
Four objectives. Two are learner-facing and two are institution-facing. Availability covers what, where and when access is provided, including enrolment flexibility and any-time starts. Inclusivity means anyone can succeed regardless of personal or situational challenges. Scalability is the ability to extend reach up or down as demand shifts, and sustainability is the need for models that work without new funding, which Mark was blunt about not expecting.
Six factors that describe any blended model: ākonga activity, kaimahi activity, resources, assessment, timetable and success services. The case studies in the book are all structured this way, so models can be compared like for like. The question to ask a colleague isn’t “do you blend?” but “what do your ākonga do, and what do you do?”
Three levels of context: micro (the classroom or cohort), meso (institutional policy, programme norms, workload models, timetabling conventions, supported technologies) and macro (system policy, quality assurance and funding). Mark was clear that this is the real breakthrough. Most blended design happens at the micro level, but meso and macro conditions largely determine whether it can work.
Art, science and the “Franken-course”
Mark argued that good design needs both the art of the kaiako (teacher) and the science of evidence-based practice. Many gifted teachers work from the gut, and the science sometimes tells them otherwise. His memorable warning was about the Franken-course: a blended design that makes sense to its creator but looks disjointed to learners, who must learn how to learn again in every course. His minimum remedy is alignment at the meso level.
He concluded his talk with three recommendations:
- Be institutionally deliberate, with a clear vision, a clear line between what is centralised and what is open to innovation, and deliberate technology choices.
- Be curious about all six factors, not just the classroom.
- Design intentionally – be informed by the significant amount of evidence that is now available.
Where I think the conversation needs to go
As I have been reflecting on Mark’s talk, I can’t help but also reflect on the keynote message from the previous day that encouraged us to consider the notion of flexibility from the perspective of the student, not simply the institution.
The framework outlined by Mark is strong for institutions that are providing, or want to provide, blended learning – and it’s certainly something I’d have found useful many years ago when I was involved in developing organizational strategies for this sort of thing. But it is built from the provider’s seat. The learner appears as one of six factors, alongside things the institution controls. Even Mark’s own illustration of the Franken-course is a learner-side problem with a provider-side fix. From the learner’s seat the Franken-course is the whole experience across providers, workplaces and communities, and no alignment inside one institution can solve that. It is the passport problem I referred to in my previous post – the learner starts over at every border.
Availability or accessibility?
Mark called availability the slipperiest of the four objectives and noted he couldn’t get it adopted alongside the ICDE’s other three. I fully support it as a principle, but even that conveys a sense of being institution-centric: “what will we make available, and how?” I prefer using accessibility as it prompts me to think more from the learner’s perspective: “I want to reach this learning from this place, at this time and in this way.” Something can be available without being accessible. Mark’s own example from his time with the Open University, with courses that start once a year, illustrates this. Every course is technically available, yet some are effectively out of reach. His any-time-start test is really an accessibility test in availability language.
For this reason I’d pair the two rather than replace one with the other. Availability is the institution’s condition, and accessibility is the learner’s test of whether it worked – and consider then, inclusivity alongside these as illustrated below:
The six factors from the learner’s seat
As I’ve spent some time considering the the six factors I’ve thought about how they might be addressed if we changed the language to put the learner in the driver’s seat. The illustration below is a quick attempt to illustrate how the questions might change:
Two things stand out for me. First, Assessment is the pivot, because it is where learner-held evidence meets institutional credentialing, and so where the question who owns the learning? has its sharpest edge. Second, the right-hand column is almost entirely meso and macro: records, pathways, standards and funding that no learner can create alone.
A learner axis
Macro, meso and micro nest vertically inside the provider system. The learner runs horizontally across all of them, and across institutions, and is the only constant in the whole picture. I’d suggest treating that as a fourth level, or as a lens to apply at each level: what does this policy, practice or choice mean for the person who has to move through it?
I need to emphasise that I’m in no way dismissing Mark’s framework – in fact I thoroughly endorse it. There is common ground here. Mark’s central claim is that teachers can’t make blended learning work from the micro level alone, because the conditions are set above them. The same logic applies to learners. Agency can’t be achieved from the learner’s seat alone, because it depends on infrastructure that someone else has to build.
An invitation
Mark explicitly invited critique of the framework and thought experiments about what the perfect blend might look like. A learner-driven blend seems to me exactly that kind of experiment. Blendagogy gives us a much-needed shared language for what providers do. The next step is to ask what that language looks like when the learner holds the record, makes the choices and carries their learning with them from border to border.
If you’re interested, the book and the community of practice Mark floated are at blendagogy.org.
