the blended learning challenge

By Barbara on 11/09/2006

CNN reports that “Roughly one in six students enrolled in higher education — about 3.2 million people — took at least one online course last fall, a sharp increase defying predictions that online learning growth is leveling off,” citing a report from the Sloan Consortium that calculates the increase at 40% in one year.

While blended learning often refers only to online courses, classroom-based courses can be implementing blended learning in varying degrees using such features such as ones on Blackboard. If you are requiring students to view PowerPoints or video clips before class through your site, or if you require students to participate in Discussion Boards out of class, then you are blending face-to-face and online learning.

You can sign up to see a recorded webinar on Blended Learning from eLearn Campus. I attended the webinar and it got me thinking about what constitutes blended learning.

A typical blended course, might be primarily online, with a set number of face-to-face classes, maybe at key points in the semester, begininning, middle, and end, for example. Do you think your campus is ready for a few experiments of this type of class for on-campus or off-campus students? Maybe not yet, but when will you have to compete with that opening statistic–or are you already?