Blended or Hybrid Schools

It is now 2007 and many US high schools, colleges, and universities are offering online courses. Some of these institutions grant degrees or certificates with no face to face facilities. Others, often called "blended" or "hybrid" programs, provide a combination of traditional classroom instruction and "elearning".

On the following pages I am going to explore the current stateof institutions offering blended curricula and add my comments. I invite you to join me in this endeavor by adding your own contributions to these pages. I welcome divergent point of view, new ideas and thoughtful refutation of my own positions.

As I visit various sites that treat this topic, I will add them to a blended web references page.  When I write commentaries I'll include links to the article referenced within the commentary text. There is a lot of material available on the web so the reference list is likely to become extensive. I'll limit my commentaries to articles that

a) provide concise overview of blended education

b) explicate important concepts or

c) seem wrong or misguided to me.

When I refer to theories or concepts discussed elsewhere on this site I'll includes links to the relevant pages.

Some terms and how they are used 

The terms, Blended and Hybrid, are generally used to mean the combination of online and face-to-face (traditional classroom) instruction. However, on the Cisco Web site?, there appear to be three contrasting environments,  "instructor-led", "Web-based training", and "hands-on".

This use of "instructor-led" is confusing because the instructor may be f2f (face to face) with one or more learners in a classroom, online at the same time (synchronously) with one or more students, or monitoring work a learner submits online (asynchronously).  The situation that contrasts to all three of these occurs when the learner interacts with a totally automated curriculum that does not require any instructor or teacher intervention.