WIRE: A Highly Interactive Blended Learning for Engineering Education - Web-Based Engineering Education: Critical Design and Effective Tools - page 152

3. Digital resources (e.g., portal, dictionaries,
encyclopedia),
4. Tutorial/exercise software, and
5. Multimedia production tools (e.g., media
capture and editing equipment, drawing
programs, webpage/multimedia production
tools).

Under this concept, the learning technologies
adopted by this study may sound uncreative and
nothing new, but the meaningful usage in the
whole blended model will inspire teachers more
innovative teaching ideas.

tHE dESIgn of WIrE modEL
for BLEndEd LEArnIng The traditional equipment and hand-on materi-

als are still the popular delivery media. Except that,
the adoption manner in school setting concentrates
on the editing of digital learning content and the
applications of Internet resources or tutorial/ex-
ercise software for delivery learning content. In
higher education, the authors referred to the report
on the latest survey of higher education teachers
in Taiwan (Center for Educational Research and
Evaluation, 2005) and found 67.1% of colleges or
universities have purchased eLearning platforms,
e.g. CMS, LMS, VLE or IMS, to support teach-
ing and learning but only 27.0% of teachers that
have personally used the platform for teaching.
We are not surprised by the big gap because the
adoption and diffusion of eLearning platform has
not steadily stayed at 'early majority' stage. Even
though the teachers who were in the 27% popu-
lation have adopted it, how many of them who
have really rethought and adjusted their teaching
with the support of eLearning platform. To some
extent, they just treat it as a bulletin board for
course information or a space for digital learning
materials.
Summarily, in this study, we believe the
adoption of learning technologies in the design
of blended learning should answer the following
essential questions:

Based on the concepts described above, this study
designs a blended learning model, the WIRE
model, that comprises three stages, the Warm-up
before class, Interaction in class, and Review and
Exercises after class. The learning activities of
the three stages are arranged as a cyclic process
that incorporates various ICT tools into face-to-
face and online contexts. The ICT tools used in
WIRE model are nothing new but focused on the
meaningful use for each learning activity, and are
in accord with the requirements mentioned in
previous section. The detailed activities and the
technology support in each stage of the WIRE
model are briefly summarized in Table 1 and
detailed in the following paragraphs.
In Warm-up stage, students are asked to read
text or digital materials online and then to answer
the warm-up questions submitted by the teacher.
Teachers can browse those answers and abstract
the misconceptions and those they have difficul-
ties to comprehend. This stage put the emphasis
on the initial reading of learning content and the
preliminary understanding of students' knowledge
background related to the content. Therefore, the
main cognitive categories of warm-up questions
should be offered based on the knowledge and
comprehension according to Bloom's taxonomy.
Teachers have not to mark, correct, or comment
their answers and just roughly browse and refer
them to adjust the lesson plan for the upcoming
classroom activities. The technology support for
this stage could be a threaded discussion tool like
a forum generally provided in general eLearning
platform (e.g. LMS, LCMS) or the blog-based tools.

1. What technologies are easy to use?
2. What technologies nowadays the teachers
are relatively familiar with?
3. What technologies can be closely integrated
into the instructional strategy?
4. What technologies can enhance the learning
effect?