A panel of senior leaders in higher education [1] encouraged the April 2005 Sloan-C Workshop on Blended Learning and Higher Education participants to focus the strategic agenda on issues of importance to students and institutions. In brief, issues that panelists cited include creating comparable or equivalent standards and benchmarks for quality learning—including f2f, online, and blended.

Because blending is going on under the radar, we need to know and be able to define for our constituencies what blended is. We need to understand exactly when a course is truly blended, not just a random mix of f2f and technology. In addition to quality, cost, and logistics (for example, how to best use and schedule classroom space to best use resources, and how to let students know the schedule before they register, how to share courses and resources with external partners), we need a richer set of quality indicators, including longitudinal data. Does blended truly make a difference in how well people learn? If so, do investments in blending make a difference in how well people learn? What are the costs for starting up? Without such focus, all we are doing is adding costs. We need in-depth case studies to help us estimate where we are going and which investments will take us in the right directions. We know that while marginal costs decrease following initial start up costs, infrastructure costs, including hardware replacement and new software systems, will continue to increase at a higher order of magnitude.

We need to keep always in mind the question: What’s the best way to teach the material in this class? Since ‘new’ technology is anything invented after you were born,we need to be aware of mismatches between faculty and student technological capabilities. We need to make it a national priority to revise standards for promotion and tenure to eliminate disincentives for teaching with technology. As online and blended instruction make teaching more visible, we should reward teaching as a public enterprise comparable to public nature of research.

[1] Thanks to panelists Carole Bulakowski, Interim Vice President for Educational Affairs, College of Lake County; James Muyskens, President, Queens College, City
University of New York; R. Michael Tanner, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago. And to Mary Niemiec who hosted the workshop for the University of Illinois.