Blended learning: Across the disciplines, across the academy

Citation: Francine S. Glazer, Editor. (2012). Blended Learning: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus. 138 pages. ISBN: 978-1-57922-324-3 (pbk) Publisher Description: This is a practical introduction to blended learning, presenting examples of implementation across a broad spectrum of disciplines. For faculty unfamiliar with this mode of teaching, it illustrates how to address the core challenge of blended learning—to link the activities in each medium so that they reinforce each other to create a single, unified, course—and offers models they can adapt. Francine Glazer and the contributors to this book describe how they integrate a wide range of pedagogical approaches in their blended courses, use groups to build learning communities, and make the online environment attractive to students. They illustrate under what circumstances particular tasks and activities work best online or face-to-face, and when to incorporate synchronous and asynchronous interactions. They introduce the concept of layering the content of courses to appropriately sequence material for beginning and experienced learners, and to ensure that students see both the online and the face-to-face components as being equal in value and devote equal effort to both modalities. The underlying theme of this book is encouraging students to develop the skills to continue learning throughout their lives. By allowing students to take more time and reflect on the course content, blended learning can promote more student engagement and, consequently, deeper learning. It appeals to today’s digital natives who are accustomed to using technology to find and share information, communicate, and collaborate, and also enables non-traditional students to juggle their commitments more efficiently and successfully. Blended Learning: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy is an edited book by Francine Glazer. The book describes five blended learning case studies. The case studies are from a variety of disciplines and institutions in American higher education. The authors of each case study have taken a self-study approach to explore their blended learning courses (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001). The introductory chapter of this book does an excellent job of setting the stage for the five case studies by clearly defining blended learning as “courses [that] employ active learning strategies through the use of a variety of pedagogical approaches (p.3) . . . When done well, blended learning combines the best attributes of face-to-face and online courses” (p.7). Glazer also indicates that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to course redesign and that the

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