Blended Learning: Education Innovation & Productivity

Blended learning is the "new" buzz in higher education. Many educational researchers have discovered that online learning environments are particularly useful for communications and collaboration. When you add in management and administrative tools available in most course management systems today online learning environments are fairly robust. But giving up the classroom seems a little drastic and premature. The result is using both environments-online and face-to-face-in a planned and pedagogically opportunistic way. Yet, the research on and about blended learning is less convincing than online asynchronous education. Still, many of us almost instinctively think blended learning will be good for higher education. Why? Let's start with some basics. [...]