George Otte, CUNY’s director of instructional technology, heads up the CUNY Online Distributed Learning Network (CUNY DLN), which is the relatively new central resource for all of CUNY’s Web-based courses. CUNY DLN started in 1999 through an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant that initially focused on helping the CUNY system build fully online courses. However, Otte said the project’s plans had to be altered to include the development and implementation of blended learning classes.

To date, CUNY DLN has developed 650 courses, and its number of blended learning courses has increased dramatically, with three blended learning courses currently being developed for every one fully online under development. When the program first launched 57 courses during the 1999-2000 academic year, only 13 course were blended. By end of the 2001-2002 academic year, there were 237 courses being offered, with 158 courses created in a blended-learning mode.

In the beginning phases of the project, faculty who had never before taught online were "reluctant to go entirely online," says Otte, adding that going with the blended model made for an easier transition for faculty to incorporate a variety of educational technology into their classrooms.

Otte says he has discovered that CUNY faculty are increasingly becoming more comfortable with teaching blended courses, and frequently these same faculty ultimately move to teaching fully online courses shortly after experiencing the results of a blended-learning environment. Additionally, Otte claims that blended classrooms facilitate "an enhanced form of instruction. It is better than both the traditional class as well as the fully asynchronous option" because "there is significantly higher student activity in a hybrid class."

For example, more than two thirds of about 60 faculty teaching blended courses this Spring 2003 say that student-to-student interactivity is much more common in a blended class. "The other feedback I’m getting increasingly is that this student interaction is not just chatting away," adds Otte. "There is an increased amount of group work being facilitated. I think group work in traditional classes is always sort of awkward or complicated, with the instructor wandering from group to group wondering what to do next. Plus, inside a traditional class, group work typically involves a lot of shuffling of materials and papers and so forth. In an online class, group work is much more easily facilitated."

Anthony Picciano, author of four books on education and technology and a professor in the Education Administration and Supervision Program at CUNY’s School of Education at Hunter College, is a strong proponent of blended learning. Picciano says that the adoption of a variety of Web and digital-based tools that help to create blended-learning environments bring many benefits to the learning and teaching experience. "Critical analysis, reflective practice, case-study methodology, collaborative learning, the Socratic method - all of these techniques translate very nicely to the online environment," Picciano says.

For example, communicating by writing in an asynchronous online- learning environment via e-mail or threaded discussion constitutes a reflective activity much less constrained by time than oral spontaneity and discussion in a typical face-to-face classroom. "What students give to an instructor [in an online class] is a much clearer representation of what they are thinking than if they were to say something similar at the moment in a face-to-face class," Picciano says.

Another excellent place where blended learning can be applied is in the large lecture-hall class that students frequently attend in early liberal arts and sciences core-requirement courses. In this face-to-face learning environment, several hundred students may attend a two-hour lecture given by a professor in an auditorium setting. Then typically a day or two later, smaller one-hour supplementary classes of 25 to 30 students are held and hosted by graduate assistants for asking questions and class discussion related to the previously held two-hour lecture. "I would take that one hour and put it online immediately," says Picciano. "There is no reason why the student should have to wait. Pedagogically, the third hour, where you have the opportunity to interact and ask questions, would be much better online, and I would argue that it is at least comparable to, if not better than, going face-to-face."

Classrooms where critical analysis plays an important role are also ideal for blended learning. By taking students’ critiques of literature, art and/or theatre, for example, to an online discussion board, faculty can facilitate ongoing discussions over days and weeks.

"There are lots of examples in the blended-learning environment where you can say you are comfortable doing something face-to-face and you know it works, but you can also look at parts of it that can be moved into the online environment," Picciano says.

This growing movement by faculty across the country to segment various parts of their classroom activities to an online environment has "enabled people that are not the most technically proficient to take small steps rather than a big leap into Web-based learning," Picciano continues. "I also think that today’s course management system software efficiently enables people with a basic technology understanding to easily move forward and put up significant amounts of course content on the Web. Because these course management systems have all kinds of great tools, faculty can concentrate on the content of the class rather than the software."

Assessment is another area where blended learning can make a difference. Picciano explains that today there is a greater demand for educators, in general, at all levels, to provide greater accountability concerning learning goals. Formal assessment techniques such as testing, exams, written assignments and research papers, as well as gauging how much a student contributes to a class discussion or team project can all be facilitated in the online-learning environment and be accurately recorded.

For instance, Picciano points to curriculums in teacher education as a good example of where "there has been a great demand either on the part of accrediting agencies or state education departments to show that your program is, in fact, generating bona-fide high quality teachers." He also mentions that accreditation agencies are beginning to make stronger recommendations throughout higher education in regard to faculty taking a closer look at the nature of their assessment techniques and strategies. "They [accrediting agencies] are not putting the onus on the administration to do assessment. They are basically saying that the administration provide the tools and the overall direction to do assessment, but it is really up to the faculty to do authentic assessment and determine whether or not students are meeting the goals and objectives of their courses."

Otte also says that once faculty start doing work in blended courses they become more aware of colleagues in the same discipline who are also teaching online, resulting in the growth of "shared teaching resources. And it’s more than giving each other their favorite Web links. They start sharing assignments and develop an interest in creating a Web site for their discipline. Much more exciting things happen, and they happen more rapidly."

Otte adds that campus administrators are also increasingly coming on board in strong support of the development of hybrid courses. "Part of it at the administration level is that they want to keep up with things, which I expected. However, I did not expect that the single greatest challenge for CUNY administrators is that we have seen a 7 percent enrollment growth with no accompanying growth in classroom space." The end result is that real estate is at a premium. Since many CUNY classes meet twice a week, the new blended models typically cut physical classroom time in half, saving on physical space, which, in New York City, is a critical issue.

"The other thing is that administrators find something comforting about hybrids because they don’t feel as threatening (as fully online)," says Otte. "With hybrids, the administration feels more fully integrated with a comfortable, well-established status quo, and that is very important."

Overall, Otte explains that evaluations completed on blended learning courses thus far show strong evidence that faculty and students also feel comfortable in this kind of learning environment and that "this is where the activity is spiking. The thing we really won’t have a choice about in the future is whether or not to use technology. It’s going to be a part of the way we teach and the way we learn . . .

"I think the hybrid itself is in its embryonic stages. A lot of this is about buildings and the convenience of an institution and its use of its physical plant. I would not be surprised - and I know there of variants of this that exist today - that the best way to do a hybrid would be to bring people together for a weekend of social bonding (face-to-face) and then turn them loose online for a five or six-week period."