Distance Education Innovations and New Learning Environments: Com ...

teachers—untrained in the discipline of instructional technology or distance education—across the world to experiment with new devices and to assess their value and impact on the learning environment.

Most important to the development of blended learning approaches has been the invention of and widespread adoption of the Internet. By the mid 1990s, many university instructors began using the Internet to provide supplemental instructional material, to communicate with their students outside of class time, or to post assignments. Increasingly, students turned to the Internet to find instructional support, to communicate with their instructors or fellow classmates, or to collaborate on group projects (Bates, 2005). These trends emerged because of technological innovations but were not always or necessarily informed by distance education methodologies (Chick et al., 2002).

However, the flowering of blended learning only commenced when distance educators began to merge their tools and methodologies for distance education environments with traditional classrooms, and when traditional instructors began to turn to the field of distance education for guidance on how to employ these emerging technologies in instructionally sound formats. Indeed, every year, more and more classes find ways to incorporate into the classroom learning tools (e.g., asynchronous discussions, multimedia interactivity, etc.) that have traditionally been the domain of distance education environments. This trend suggests that blended learning promises to be a potent educational approach for years to come (Wilson, 2005).

There is another important reason why blended learning has emerged so strongly in the past half-dozen years and why it is such a promising approach for the future: It attempts to combine the very best of both learning worlds, whereas prior to this time (during the first and second generation of distance education), students and teachers usually only had access to the positive pedagogical features of the one learning mode they had chosen (traditional or distance). Now that blended learning is a growing practice, students and teachers can benefit from a wide range of positive pedagogical possibilities that certainly will impact teaching and learning for years to come.