Just finished a paper that tries to draw a fine line between blended learning and fully online delivery.
Even though “blended learning” was coined in the run-up to the dot-com frenzy at the turn of the century, it didn’t acquire its present meaning until the middle of the last decade. Before this, it was understood as being a mix of just about anything, particularly in the training context: methods, technologies, pedagogies, tasks, etc.
But as the term became more popular in higher education, what was “blended” was increasingly seen as two common modes of delivery in higher ed : the college classroom and the online course.
More recently, there have been attempts to develop taxonomies of different types of blended learning arrangements and combinations. This paper examines some of these in order to create a “decision tree” for determining what’s blended and what ain’t.
It’s not a simple as it sounds!