FOREWORDS

One unique feature of this handbook is that it contains two forewords. The foreword by Jay Cross, a thought leader in learning technology, performance improvement, and organizational culture, who coined the terms e-learning and work flow learning, reflects the corporate training aspects of this handbook. The second foreword, by Michael G. Moore, a pioneer in distance education and founder and editor of the American Journal of Distance Education among other accomplishments, is written from a higher education perspective.

Foreword

Jay Cross

When Curt Bonk asked me to contribute a chapter to this book, I flat out refused. As you might guess from the quantity of top-notch authors who appear here, Curt is persistent. He asked me again, and again I turned him down, this time with an explanation.

I told him I considered blended learning a useless concept. To my way of thinking, blending is new only to people who were foolish enough to think that delegating the entire training role to the computer was going to work. I could not imagine unblended learning. My first-grade teacher used a blend of storytelling, song, recitation, reading aloud, flash cards, puppetry, and corporal punishment.

Is it not nutty for a learning strategist to ask, "Why blend?" The more appropriate question is, "Why not blend?" Imagine an episode of This Old House asking, "Why should we use power tools? Hand tools can get the job done." For both carpenters and learning professionals, the default behavior is using the right tools for the job.

My perspective is corporate, not academic. My bottom line is organizational performance, not individual enlightenment. Not that I am dismissive of research. In nearly thirty years in what we used to call the training business, I have read my share of Dewey, Kolb, Bransford, Gagné, Schank, and John Seely Brown, but as a businessman, I also pay allegiance to Peter Drucker, Stan Davis, and the Harvard Business Review. And I hobnob with least a dozen of the authors whose work you are about to read.

Here are a few issues for you to consider as you ponder this fine collection of observations and advice from learning pioneers around the globe.

What's a Blend?

First of all, these are not useful blends:

After reading a few chapters of this book, you will see these for what they are: oversimplifications.

Four or five years ago, it was commonplace to hear, "We've tried e-learning. People didn't like it. It didn't work very well." This is akin to saying, "I once read a book. It was difficult to understand. I'm not going to do that again." The book in your hands describes rich variations and applications of e-learning. After reading it, you'll find that you can no more generalize about e-learning than you can generalize about books. Consider this description of a blend from Macromedia's Ellen Wagner (see Chapter Four, this volume):

Evolving blended learning models provide the essential methodological scaffolding needed to effectively combine face-to-face instruction, online instruction, and arrays of content objects and assets of all form factors. For example, in such a blended learning scenario, a student may find him or herself participating in a face-to-face class discussion; he or she may then log in and complete an online mastery exercise or two, then copy some practice exercises to a PDA to take advantage of what David Metcalf calls "stolen moments for learning"-those times between classes or meetings, while on the train, or waiting for an appointment. Think about sending a text message with results of your practice sessions to someone in your virtual study group using your mobile phone-and getting a voice mail with feedback on your results when you arrive at the end of your flight.

People do not know what they like; they like what they know. For example, many assume that face-to-face instruction is the one best way to teach and that online learning is inherently inferior. They seek ways for online initiatives to support the high-grade face-to-face experience. Capella University turns this view on its head, asking what face-to-face support is required to supplement online learning. Having found online learning universally effective, Capella uses face-to-face only to further social goals such as building a support network or creating informal affinity groups. From its perspective, a blend may contain no face-to-face element at all.

Blended learning can take place while waiting in line at the grocery store or taking the bus home. Its ingredients may be courses, content chunks, instant messaging pings, blog feedback, or many other things. Interaction is the glue that holds all these pieces together. Interaction comes in many forms, not just learner and instructor, but also learner-to-content, learner-to-learner, and learner-to-infrastructure. Interaction can create an experience so compelling that it makes workers hungry to learn and drives otherwise sane people to pay four dollars for a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

What Goes into the Blend?

Great recipes are the product of generations of experimentation, tasting, and refinement. E-learning is at the same embryonic stage as American cuisine when home chefs rarely started a sauce without a can of condensed mushroom soup, and garlic was reserved for scaring away vampires.

First-generation e-learning initiated, delivered, and completed online; its consumers lost their appetites. Today's tastier recipes include organizational skills assessments, books, content objects, workshops, clinics, seminars, simulations, collaboration, technical references, learning games, and links to communities of practice.

At the University of Phoenix, I developed a classroom-based business curriculum in 1976. A dozen years later, an online program debuted. More recently, the university introduced blended programs that combine some classroom and some online. Add more classroom, and the result is the "local model" blend; add more online and the result is the "distance model." Some blends are like "vibration cooking": a pinch of this, a handful of that, and however much wine is left in the bottle. C'est bricolage.

IBM's four-tier model shows how the ingredients of the blend must be matched to the nature of the outcomes sought. Web pages work fine for performance support. Simulations are good for developing understanding. Groups learn from community interaction and live virtual programs. Higher-order skills require coaching, role play, and perhaps face-to-face sessions. Each dish requires its own recipe.

Blends are more than a learning stew, for as the authors here amply demonstrate, blends fall along many dimensions (Figure F.1).

FIGURE F.1. DIMENSIONS OF THE BLENDED LEARNING STEW.

A Blend of Blends

The ideal blend is a blend of blends. Take the last dimension in Figure F.1: formal to informal learning. Studies find that most corporate learning is informal. It's unscheduled. It's learning on the job. It's trial-and-error. It's asking someone who knows.

If informal learning is so important, dare we leave it to chance? If we seek an optimal result, we cannot. Instead of a single blend that calls for x percent of this and y percent of that, I propose we take the blends of many of the authors here into account. We must replace one-dimensional thinking with simultaneous consideration of dozens of pie charts.

The many cooks of The Handbook of Blended Learning do not spoil the broth. On the contrary, their diversity of opinion and method enriches the book. Editors Curt Bonk and Charles Graham are to be congratulated for preserving the unique flavor contributed by each author.

Mike Wenger and Chuck Ferguson of Sun Microsystems make a strong argument for thinking in terms of a learning ecology instead of a blend of classroom and e-learning. "Classroom" deprives the concept of the rich, multifaceted experiences that take place there (see Chapter Six, this volume). Similarly, "e-learning" covers over the multiple possibilities born of the marriage of the learner and the Internet. There's simply a lot more to it than that.

School's Out

Corporations seek self-reliant workers they can trust to do the right thing without supervision. Every manager wants self-starters on her team. Yet when it comes to learning, many workers wait for others to tell them what to do. Why don't they take matters into their own hands? I think it's a vestige of schooling.

Several hundred years ago, compulsory schools were set up as a separate reality. Students were seedlings, while schools were the greenhouses to protect them from outside elements. The mission of schools was transmitting values and teaching a body of knowledge. The noise of the real world might taint the righteousness and clarity of the lessons.

Many of us equate learning with schooling. That is why we think of learning as something a person does in isolation and that its ideal delivery takes place in the classroom or the library, cloistered from the outside. Group work is by and large discouraged (it's called "cheating"). Authorities choose the curriculum....