Blended learning is not new, though its use has steadily risen in higher education
due to pedagogical, economic and other reasons and, while it will grow (O’Laughlin,
2007; Ross & Gage, 2006), recent research supported by the Sloan-C Consortium (Allen,
Seaman & Garrett, 2007) indicate that its use is complex and varied, and reflectsa
dynamic state of flux in higher education. On the one hand, as technologies become
faster and cheaper, more and greater opportunities for education can be provided to more
people via online learning. On the other hand, many people choose blended learning for
its mix of online convenience and face-to-face instruction (O’Laughlin, 2007). The
movement to technology-enhanced instruction, in whatever its form, is changing higher
education worldwide.
Graham Spanier (2007), President of Pennsylvania State University, in an address
to the faculty on “educating our youth for the global economic revolution” had this to say
about blended learning:
I believe the single greatest unrecognized trend in education today is
the merger of traditional classroom instruction with online learning and