ALN Principles for Blended Environments
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Principle 4: Provide continuous support for role adjustment.
To help learners succeed with the magnitude of role adjustment for cognitive, social and teaching presence:

• Require orientation (induction) courses that prepare students for the rigor of online learning.
• Use peer-to-peer interaction to support novice and expert online learning.
• Emphasize community-of-inquiry connectivity via synchronous and asynchronous interaction.

Principle 5: Provide active institutional support and recognition for faculty.
To actively support faculty who have competing priorities institutions should provide commensurate funding, training in pedagogy and technology, and support for disciplinary research and publication related to online and blended environments:

• Recognize, publish, and reward best practices in blended teaching.
• Engage faculty in peer review to build community and to promote continuous improvement in blended practices.

Principle 6: Ensure learning design appropriately integrates face to face and online components.

• Consider which components can be learned as well or better online, and what technology would best support these components.
• Design components specifically for skill-, attitude-, or competency-learning [3].

Principle 7: Promote metacognitive reflection on the process of learning.

• Use well-defined E-activities to clarify goals for activities, to enable group cohesion, and to create legacy and reusable learning Spend time with learners early in the course to clarify purposes and expectations for online activities.
• Specify expectations clearly in syllabus, including time on task; clarify and negotiate as needed.
• Create small interdependent groups that require participation from all group members to achieve the group goal.
• Define “meaningful” discussion participation clearly using rubrics and examples.