I think the idea of blended learning comes with a few benefits that I myself have not reflected much upon before reading up on the concept. Hybrid learning, i.e., to have a mix between at campus and online students (Kenney and Newcombe, 2011), is something I am very used to, both as a teacher and a student. But the blended learning, i.e., to combine face-to-face instructions with technology mediated instructions (Graham and Allen, 2005), seems to pose some new possibilities. New, in the sense that, with the ability to use “the best of both worlds”, teachers can no design courses that mixes the flexibility of online courses with face-to-face interaction.

The upside of this latter form of education, i.e., blended, is that a series of synchronous (e.g., traditional classrooms, virtual classrooms, live practice labs) and asynchronous (e.g., email, online bulletin boards or communities) learning environments along with different physical or virtual media to deliver the learning content. Kaur (2013) provides a good overview, and explains that the goal of blended learning is to leverage the advantages of each environment and emphasizes bringing together the online and face-to-face classroom elements. The media components of blended learning can be, e.g., face-to-face that is formal (e.g. instructor led classrooms, workshops or coaching/mentoring) or informal (e.g., collegial comments). The media can also be virtual in a synchronous form (e.g., live e-learning) or asynchronous (e.g., online forums), but also take a self-paced learning approach (e.g., web learning modules, scenarios, and self-assessments).

Of course, as with any new way of anything, one should take care to use and apply that which make sense, and not just for the sake of applying. That is why blended learning really is a double-edged sword. One the one hand, the different forms of environments and media that opens up with this particular type of learning is broad, but with this broadness, great care must be given to ensure that the environment and media used is serving the goals of the course and can be used successfully by all participants, i.e., not introduced to a course simply because it is available.

Looking ahead a bit into Professor Richard Elmore’s modes of learning, blended learning provides a good tool to introduce both the hierarchical mode of learning as well as the distributed, e.g., by leveraging different synchronous and asynchronous learning environments. While I myself usually mix between the two hierarchical modes of learning in my courses in a typical synchronous fashion, I will start to introduce more asynchronous (e.g., online-forums) to try to nudge students towards more self-reflecting and self-driven learning, on top of the normal synchronous learning (e.g., classrooms led and workshop learning).