Abstract (4th cover page)
This essay deals with the so-called in French “Enseignement à Distance” ("Distance Teaching"), renamed here "Hybrid Teaching-Learning" (HTL, in English “Blended Teaching-Learning”) because, from the author's perspective of school didactics, it crosses the fundamental disciplinary problem of the teaching-learning relationship with that of the face-to-face-distance relationship. Its objective is to propose activation and idea generation tools for the design of pluralistic HTL systems.
The first chapter is entirely devoted to a critique of the expression used in French, “enseignement à distance”, which does not only hide the question of teaching-learning, but also that of their relationship; the questions of evaluation, use, time, education; and finally those of proximity and absence, which naturally form two other notional couples of this problematic with distance and presence. This critique leads to an analysis of HTL in seven notional pairs, including a "four-pair" and a "three-pair": teaching-learning-assessment-use, class group-small group-individual, short time-long time, direct-deferred, proximity-distance, presence-absence.
The second chapter analyzes HTL as a "system" in which any change –such as the introduction of a quantitatively and qualitatively important change in the "distance" subsystem– forces an overall reorganization. This system is first compared to the historical "school form" of French school education, in which distance is sought, which is not that of the family environment from the school, as in HTL, but on the contrary the distance at which the school is sought to be maintained from the family, and more generally from the social environment of the pupils, in order to educate them in republican values and personal autonomy. The author then compares HTL to the "flipped classroom", which he criticizes for not taking into account the systemic effects on the teaching-learning of languages. This chapter concludes with the idea that "the construction of HTL devices [is] a matter of complex reengineering".
The third chapter, by means of two examples of available models, that of the different cognitive models of teaching-learning and that of the different methodological matrices, illustrates the need, when moving to an HTL system, not to be satisfied with dividing the previous activities between face-to-face and distance learning, but to rethink the system from the start, which implies mobilizing the fundamental didactic models from the very beginning of its design. This chapter leads to a proposal for a "heuristic model for reengineering HTL" crossing the types of environment (the classroom as a school environment, the student's personal environment, the classroom as a micro-society, the student's society, the foreign society) with the different didactic domains (teaching, learning, evaluation and use).
The fourth and last chapter presents the third model proposed in this essay, a "complex model of the face-to-face relationship in HTL", which crosses the different domains not with the environments, as in the previous model of chapter 3, but with the teaching-learning relationship declined in seven different modes: the continuum, the opposition, the evolution, the contact, the dialogic, the instrumentalization and the framing.