Blended learning is widely used in L&D, but does it work? Karen (CEO, Montessori Global Education) and Tom McDowall (L&D expert) unpack why learning, not format, must come first.
Most programmes didn’t start out as a bad blend.
They grew one piece at a time: a webinar here, an e-learning module there, a workshop to round it off.
On paper, it looks varied. To the person working through it, it often feels like a checklist.
And the bigger the audience gets, the more tempting it is to build one route and push everyone down it. Ten people can get a tailored experience.
But ten thousand people? They usually get a course.
Learning and development teams now more than ever need to design around the learner, not the format.
Karen Chetwynd, CEO at Montessori Global Education, joined L&D expert Tom McDowall for the second episode of BuildEmpire’s webinar series, Designing Effective Blended Learning Initiatives in partnership with Totara, to explain why.
They unpack what blended learning really means to them and how to make it work for thousands of learners at once.
And the common theme? Blended learning is a relational experience, not a mix of formats.
⏰ TL;DR
Blended learning needs to be designed around choice and connection, not formats. People need to be able to take the route that works for them and still feel part of a community. Trust your learners and act on their feedback while they are still learning, not months later. Build in real autonomy and reflection, whilst questioning every assessment you set because passive learning rarely gets the results you want.
Keep reading to learn:
- What is blended learning?
- Why blended learning isn’t just a mix of formats, even at scale
- Why trust matters more than control
- Why you shouldn’t wait until the end to act on feedback
- How to get forums working when nobody’s posting
- The difference between real autonomy and the illusion of choice
- Why reflection can’t be done on instruction
What is blended learning?
Blended learning is a mixture of formats and combines face-to-face or live learning with online, self-paced learning.
Its purpose is that all parts of the learning work toward the same outcome.
Each format does what’s best at. For example, self-paced content covers knowledge learners can pick up in their own time. Live sessions are kept for discussion, practice and things that genuinely benefit from being together.
Related: Distributed learning: Designing for connectivity not proximity
Alternatively, you can use a flipped classroom model, where learners work through content first, then bring what they’ve learned to a live session to apply and discuss it.
It gives learners real flexibility over when, where and how they learn without losing the connection that makes learning stick.
But when it’s done badly, it’s just a mix of different formats that are not designed with learners in mind.
Karen is CEO of Montessori Global Education, which has nearly 75 years of Montessori activity behind it internationally.
For them, quality blended learning goes further. It’s “an intentional learning experience that brings a community together.”
Blended learning now shapes everything they do for its international learners and global community.
Related: What is blended learning?
Here’s what it means in practice, and what it should change about how you build learning for people who all need something slightly different.
Why blended learning isn’t just a mix of formats, even at scale
Blended learning isn’t new to L&D.
But when you ask people to define it, as Tom put it, “we tend to get a little bit soft around the edges”.
The conversation usually jumps to delivery modality: a webinar, a piece of e-learning, a group meeting.
Related: How to create an e-learning course that learners love
Karen’s definition starts somewhere else entirely. Face-to-face and online both play a part, “but the key to it is that connected experience.
It’s a relational experience, and I think you forget that at your peril.”
She was blunt about the alternative. Throwing content online and hoping for the best isn’t what Montessori’s experience says works. “It’s not sustainable.”
Blended learning should be a toolkit rather than a template.
And if your audience is individuals, Karen said, “you deliberately start designing from a very different place because you know how unique people are.”
When you have a 3-person team, it’s easy to champion the individual.
Tom’s question is what happens when you have 10,000.
Karen’s answer: “It’s about choice.”
Nobody can sit and analyse the best route for 10,000 learners one by one. So you build an environment with enough range that people can select, self-direct and find their own way through.
Then you make it as relational as possible, so the human touch is still there whichever path they take.
And that needs to start early. Most people arrive with a fixed idea of how they learn, and they’ll show it from induction onwards.
Some go for the written format, some watch the video, some listen to the audio.
From there, Montessori can run everything self-paced, which makes every journey individual by default.
Checkpoints also do a lot of work.
They check what someone’s just read or heard. And they give learners a genuine chance to say they’re not sure they got it and have another go.
So does offering learners a way back.
Online learning, as Karen put it, “drags people forwards, but often doesn’t allow them to go back.”
Letting people return to earlier material, without it being hidden away in a previous unit, builds confidence.
Picking a format once shouldn’t lock someone into it.
“You just watched a video. I’m not gonna assume you want the next video.”
That all sits on a scaffolded approach, central to Montessori’s principles.
Formative assessment gives the team points to redirect.
Mentors are always on hand, whether for a quick question or a proper look at where someone is.
And peer support runs alongside all of it.
Related: How to deliver personalised learning at scale
Why trust matters more than control
Tom hears the same worry again and again when it comes to trust vs control with teams: “I’m giving up control. That’s scary. I can’t trust my people to do this.”
His view? If you have that little trust in your people, you’ve got a much bigger problem than one learning intervention.
Karen’s test for this is simple. Would you be comfortable sharing that concern directly with the people you’re worried about?
The answer is probably always no.
“On a daily basis, you’re trusting them with fairly significant things,” she said. “And then when it comes to things like individualised learning, I don’t understand where the shift sits.”
And trust doesn’t just run one way. It’s rare for a manager to doubt their team while the team has complete faith in the manager.
A way to work towards a solution is co-creation.
We’ve all filled out feedback surveys that disappear into the void.
After a few, you just keep clicking the same responses because it feels like nobody is listening.
Learners need to feel like they’re shaping the experience for themselves or the next cohort and that, by Karen’s words, is “hugely powerful”.
Don’t wait until the end to act on feedback
A lot of programmes follow the same pattern.
You build it, deliver it, measure it and then maybe change something at the end.
Montessori Global Education does it differently.
While learners are still on a journey, the team is already updating unit seven or eight based on the response.
Karen spent decades working with higher education students, which made her sceptical of the traditional model.
The strongest argument for end-of-cycle feedback is that it helps next year’s cohort.
Related: Why giving feedback in learning is crucial for effective learning
“There’ll be a handful of them that really care about next year’s cohort, but the majority of them are just glad they’ve finished.”
Add the time lag: in a world that moves fast, the data’s out of date before you can use it.
There’s a relational point too. If you only value someone’s reflection six months later, “you’re not truly valuing their lived experience at that moment.”
It’s not necessarily about rewriting a unit by next week.
You can do things like refresh forum provocations and quest test questions using last week’s feedback.
If a video isn’t working and there’s zero time to remake it, then take it out.
“There’s no point in sitting there having the same feedback from the next group.”
And ask learners to bring in their own reference material, case studies and industry examples.
It keeps content fresh and makes them part of building it.
How to get forums to actually work
If you work in L&D, you’ve likely had this problem or heard of it before.
You can have the best intentions with adding forums to your learning platform, but what if nobody is actually engaging?
Related: What is social learning?
One study shows that only 28.3% of respondents actively participate in online learning communities.
And Tom regularly hears from organisations that “tried” forums, and nobody used them.
Karen’s been there too. In the early days, almost everyone said forums weren’t used enough. Or a few keen learners posted a lot, then got fed up because nobody replied.
The turning point came from a simple question she put to her team: what’s the difference between social media and a forum?
People are more than happy to comment online on things they perhaps don’t know much about, yet hold back in a learning forum.
The answer? Provocations.
Someone responsible for the forum posts something “not contentious, but maybe slightly contentious” that pokes a little and gets a reaction.
“You can guarantee on social media if you see something you disagree with, the comments are huge.”
A few other things that the team have tried have been encouraging people to say who they are and where they’re from. This can build community fast, especially in global forums.
Keeping forums fresh is another tip. Clearing out old cohorts’ posts when needed stops the forum from going stale.
Karen also mentioned opening the forums up beyond text.
There are tools like Padlet for graphics and video to turn forums into a genuine sharing space.
Tom agreed too; we would never tell people in a room they could only communicate in writing, so why do it online?
Related: Social learning examples
And placement matters just as much as format.
If a forum sits straight after a block of technical content, there comes a competition of what people read.
It works better in a place of reflection, about how something affects your role and that pressure drops.
Karen’s challenge: “Does this become a bit of a, what did you just read? Test it now, or are we giving space for really considered reflection?”
Trust is the other piece. In a workplace, not knowing something carries perceived risk.
In a group of 20, Karen said, you can guarantee the two who aren’t engaging are anxious about it.
Her fix is slow and steady. Start early, before people feel they should have mastered anything. Use the online version of icebreakers: “We understand how to do it. We need to translate that.”
And don’t make the forum the only option. Small-group sessions, breakout rooms and mentoring all give quieter people other ways in.
Culture shapes all of this. Montessori believes in vertical grouping, where everyone at every level has something to learn and share.
Not every organisation is there yet. As Tom put it, borrowing from Guy Wallace: adopt what you can, adapt the rest.
Real autonomy and the illusion of choice
Autonomy can have different meanings to different people, so Tom asked Karen to pin down her thoughts.
“It’s an awareness of self-direction. It’s an awareness of choice.”
Montessori’s core belief is that “opportunity empowers, full stop.”
Autonomy is the end goal because it gets better outcomes: learners understand why they’ve picked up a skill, know what they’ll do with it, and own the journey that got them there.
“Learners are active, and it’s very rare that passive learning yields the results that we want.”
Tom flagged the trap many programmes fall into: a false sense of choice.
Option A or option B, except they’re the same thing dressed differently.
People spot it quickly, and he called the illusion of choice “almost insulting to a human being.”
Get it wrong, and it lingers. People bring past learning experiences with them, not just from school but from their working lives.
“If they have a really, really poor experience with some learning in February and you ask them to do some in August, they’re gonna clearly remember February’s experience.”
Then there’s assessment, and AI.
Tom asked whether robust assessment, autonomy and AI are bound to clash.
Karen sees opportunity, as long as you get hands-on now.
With AI at everyone’s fingertips, discernment becomes vital, and that comes back to self-reflection: “the start, the middle, and the end.”
On assessment, her challenge is to check, triple-check and ask someone else why you’re measuring what you’re measuring.
Knowing how fast learners got from point A to point B is data. But what do you do with it when the real outcome is months down the line?
“If the people that are involved in your learning practice, if they don’t know why they’re being assessed, it’s questionable as to why it should be there.”
Tom’s advice was even simpler: if you can’t say why it’s there, “delete the assessment, be brave.”
Autonomy also changes how people share. Karen’s goal when facilitating is to get people “bubbling up information that they’re eager to share with the people around them.”
Tom took it further. Make that normal, and you give people a licence to trespass: to step into another team’s space and say, “We solved that problem six years ago. Let me show you.”
That’s how silos start to break down.
Why reflection can’t be done on instruction
Tom called reflection “woefully underserved and underloved.”
Early in his career, it meant ending a session with “reflect on what you’ve learned,” then “consider yourselves reflected.”
Karen’s starting point is that flexibility has to be real. “You can choose to do this reflection now or at home” isn’t flexible.
And reflection, however vital, “cannot be done on instruction.” You can’t sit someone in a quiet room and announce that now is the time to reflect.
The reality is that reflection pops up constantly, just never at a convenient moment.
You’re driving, or on the train, and something from yesterday comes back to you.
You can’t journal it there, and then, so it builds.
Then when someone finally asks you to reflect, you get stuck. “We’ve kind of made a rod for our own back.”
Her fix is to find out, with your people, what actually works for them. “I can guarantee you it is not Friday afternoon at three when their appraisal is.”
Done well, reflection opens doors. It helps people say “this was challenging” or “I’m proud of how I handled that” without fear.
It gives quieter team members a chance to test new ways of working in a breakout room, a supportive pairing or with peer support.
And it starts better conversations about where to go next. “Never be afraid of questioning: how do you feel? Why? How is that working for you?”.
Wondering where to start?
If your organisation is still in “there’s a problem, here’s some e-learning” mode, Karen’s first step is to question your real intention.
Not the aim of one piece of training, but what you’re actually trying to do.
Is it helping a team feel like a team?
Or is there a problem to solve in a set timeframe?
Both change the design.
“Simply because this is what we’re meant to do is not an intention.”
Next, plan your support mechanisms before you launch.
Assume it’ll work, then ask what happens when engagement dips, or feedback needs attention.
- Do you have the capacity to review and change?
- Do you have mentors?
- “How ready are you to live and breathe that responsive experience?”
And start small.
Rolling out to 30,000 employees on your first attempt is “maybe a little step too far.”
Go steady, learn as you go, and bring your team into the process.
Pull it all together, and the pattern repeats: design around connection, not formats.
Give people real choice and a way back, not one route dressed up as many.
Trust them, and act on their feedback while they’re still with you.
Put forums where they invite reflection, not recall.
And question every assessment you set.
Get that right, and blended learning stops being a delivery mix and starts being an experience people want to come back to.
More from this series
This was the second of five sessions in BuildEmpire’s webinar series in partnership with Totara.
Follow our LinkedIn page to register for the next one, where we’ll have another guest tackling more big learning ops challenges.
And sign up for our newsletter to get more insights on learning and development just like this.
FAQs
What is blended learning?
Blended learning combines face-to-face and online learning, but the formats are only part of it. Done well, it’s an intentional, connected experience that brings learners together as a community. Learners get a range of tools and routes to choose from, so the experience suits them as individuals rather than pushing everyone through the same sequence.
How do you make blended learning work at scale?
Build in choice rather than trying to tailor a route for every person. Offer content in different formats, let people move between them, and make it easy to go back to earlier material. Add checkpoints so learners can check their understanding, keep mentors and peer support available, and act on feedback while the programme is still running.
How do you get learners to use discussion forums?
Give people a reason to respond. Slightly provocative questions spark more discussion than open prompts. Place forums after moments of reflection rather than straight after technical content, so they don’t feel like a test. Start early with low-pressure introductions, allow images, audio and video as well as text, and offer other ways in, like breakout rooms and mentoring, for people who are less confident posting publicly.
