In what disciplines and which institutions?
Projects funded by the Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign (http://www.center.rpi.edu/
PewGrant.html) demonstrate the breadth of institutions and disciplines using blended approaches. The grant program focuses on the use of technology to redesign high enrollment courses to enhance quality and reduce costs. The table below lists some of the courses that have been (or are in the process of being) redesigned with cost savings and learning increases:

At the University of Wisconsin, faculty in art, materials, anthropology, and business, and more, participated in the UWM Hybrid project. The project provided individual faculty members with development and support to convert or create courses and prepare to teach in a blended mode for the first time. (http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/LTC/hybrid.html.) The University of Central Florida (UCF) developed a methodology for course development for blended and online courses. In addition to web courses (with no regular meetings), UCF offers "M" courses, where "some face-to-face instruction is replaced with web instruction." Enrollment in these reduced seat time courses increased from 1,966 students in Fall 2000 to 4,647 in Fall 2002 (UCF Virtual Campus 2002). The UW and the UCF programs include faculty development programs for working with technology and instruction staff to design courses and to prepare to teach in the new modalities.

Richard Voos
Babson College

Blended learning—a combination of face-to-face and online media, with "seat time" significantly reduced—is an increasing proportion of instruction in U.S. higher education. Supplementing wholly face-to-face courses and wholly online asynchronous courses with technology is nearly ubiquitous.

Blending grows as people recognize the value of asynchronous learning. An August 2001 report from Eduventures notes that "roughly 1.3 million postsecondary students [are] taking online courses" (Evans 2001). The National Center for Education Statistics (2002) reports that in the 1999-2000 academic year, eight percent of undergraduate and ten percent of graduate students participated in distance education. A National Governors Association report on the "The State of E-Learning in the States" noted that "58% of all two- and four-year colleges offered distance learning courses in 1998; 84 percent of all colleges expect to do so by 2002" (NGA 2002). Primary Research surveyed seventy five distance learning programs; the mean annual enrollment growth rate for 2002 was 41% (Primary Research 2002). The Campus Computing Project (2001) reported the number of institutions that have selected a single platform for course management increased in 2001 to 73 percent (from just over 50 percent the year before). Already in 1998, according to the NCES (2002b), forty percent of full-time faculty made use of "course specific web sites."

The literature about blended courses is full of examples from all disciplines, at all levels across the spectrum of education, and with wide variation in technologies used and in face-to-face meeting time.

Blended learning courses can replace synchronous classroom seat time with asynchronous online learning activities so that instruction occurs both in the classroom and online. Given the fluidity of the technologies and the near infinite number of ways that technology is applied and courses are organized in higher education, the presence of both conditions distinguish blended from wholly online and wholly classroom programs and courses.