Figure 7: ICT learners’ sense-making experience in blended learning

The lack of clarity on the purpose of using BL is a contributing factor to the fragmented sense-making experience of learners and of their limited sense-making opportunities. At the time of data collection for this course, it had been run by the training provider for six years, though BL had been in place for only six months. Before this, the course was delivered purely by classroom teaching over a nine-month period. The change to BL was the training provider’s response to policy changes; namely, the government initiative to incorporate BL in all fullqualification WSQ courses by January 2017 in order to maintain the training provider’s training subsidy. However, the change appeared to have failed to take learners’ needs and capability development into consideration and in aligning their own infrastructure and manpower readiness to the change.

The second reason for the learner’s fragmented sense-making experience in this course was related to WSQ’s strict competency requirements. A key feature of the curriculum design was the mapping of the SAP course materials provided by the vendor, with competency requirements. The primary focus on content, rather than attention to the purpose and learning outcomes of the course and how they relate to the content, appears to have contributed to a highly mechanistic design that fails to build in more sense-making opportunities.

4.1.2 Less fragmented experience (Healthcare: Therapy Support and Optometry courses)

As described in Section 3.2, the adult learners in both healthcare courses experienced strong sense-making as compared with ICT learners, because they were provided with more opportunities to make connections between theory and practice and conceive a more systemic understanding of the industry through authentic practical sessions and workplace learning, in addition to opportunities for noticing, recalling and labelling. Though both courses had a long tradition of using BL, learners’ sense-making experience still tended to be somewhat fragmented mainly due to the curriculum design of the courses.

The Therapy Support course placed the workplace attachment at the end of two months’ classroom teaching. The learners found that some techniques and procedures they learned during the workplace attachment were different from what was covered during their classroom learning. They also found that each of the workplaces they were attached to had