Early this month, December 2004, Sloan-C held an online workshop on blended learning titled "Blended Learning and the Generations," in which Chuck Dziuban, Joel Hartman and Patsy Moskal, from the University of Central Florida (UCF), drew on seven years of longitudinal data they had collected about UCF learners from four generations and summarized findings from UCF’s distributed learning initiative, including comparative analyses for blended courses.

Dziuban presented some of the characteristics of these four generations, collected and synthesized from numerous studies in the field,  labeled as follows:

Matures (born prior to 1946): Dedicated to a job they take on, respectful of authority, place duty before pleasure.

Baby Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964): Live to work, generally optimistic, influence policy and products.

Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980): Work to live, have clear and consistent expectations, value contributing to the whole.

Millennials (born between 1981 and 1994): Live in the moment, expect immediacy of technology, earn money for immediate consumption.

Millennials, in particular, were the primary topic of interest in the online workshop, as they represent the current and next-to-arrive traditional-aged students in higher education. Also referred to as "digital natives," "generation Y," and the "net generation," Dziuban defined Millennials, in part, as visual multi taskers with technologies in their backpacks who don’t read newspapers because they find them boring and gray with no color, as noted by a recent National Public Radio broadcast on Millennials.

Hartman took the definition of Millennials a bit further, explaining that they are the first generation to grow up in a totally digital word. "To a great extent Millennials’ attitudes and behaviors are being shaped by technology in ways that are far different than previous generations." When it comes to educational technologies, Millenials have high expectations based on their Internet experiences, i.e Google and Amazon. "They expect immediacy; they expect the ability to customize to their own needs; they expect 24 x 7 services," said Hartman. "They also expect their learning experiences to be engaging."

Moskal gave a brief presentation related to the data UCF has collected since offering fully online courses in 1997 and blended courses in 1998. She said that while students from all the generations are satisfied with blended learning, the older Baby Boomers and Generation Xers typically express a higher degree of satisfaction with such courses than the Millennials.

The older generations also showed more of a tendency to change the way they approach blended learning courses based on their experiences, and they also indicated, more so than Millennials, that fully online and blended courses facilitated higher levels of interaction that they found easy to engage in.

Moskal added that the research at UCF has yet to discover why these differences occur between the older generations and the Millennials.

While all students typically have a good number of very positive perceptions of blended and fully online teaching and learning modalities (see Dziuban’s comments in cover story), they also have a good number of negative perceptions that are interesting to note, including:

• Reduced face-to-face time: Ironically, while students love the increased level of online interactions, they also miss the face-to-face interactions of a traditional classroom experience.
• Technology problems: Moskal said that their motto at UCF is "there are those who have been down, and there are those who are going down." In other words, technology problems are part of the business that faculty and students have to learn how to deal with at certain times, i.e. when three successive hurricanes hit the state of Florida recently.
• Reduced instructor assistance: Not enough quality access to faculty of a fully online or blended class can sometimes become an issue with students. At UCF, novice online and blended faculty are interacting with veteran online and blended faculty to ensure that access to faculty is not an issue and that students always feel comfortable interacting with their teachers.
• Increased workload: Some students have the misperception that online or blended courses are going to require less work and are ultimately awaken to the opposite in which online and blended courses actually require more work than face-to-face classes.

Hartman added that Millennials may have a tendency to create a personal technological world based on such web-based environments as wikis, blogs and instant messaging that are typically not part of the optimum institutional environment. If these types of technologies are preferred, then how can such technologies be utilized effectively in modern teaching and learning environments? "That is something we have to think about."