Institutional Adoption and Implementation of Blended Learning in the Era of Intelligent Education

Abstract

Blended learning (BL) reform is one of the vital methods to improve the teaching quality of institutions in the intelligent education era. However, institutions are always faced with many obstacles (instructors’ reluctance/inability to change, etc.) in conducting the reform. What is worse, very few studies have reported the design and effect of such a transformation. This study designed an intervention of institutional BL reform by making a unified deployment based on Graham et al.’s BL adoption framework: identifying strategy, structure, and support issues at three developmental stages. More than 900 courses (involving more than 14,000 students and more than 2000 instructors) within S university were taken as a sample. A quasi-experiment was designed to investigate the effect of the intervention on S university’s BL course transformation, students’ learning, instructors’ professional development, etc. Course logs, responses to students’ course evaluation forms, and instructors’ questionnaires were collected and analyzed. Results indicated that S university systematically conducted the BL transformation and gradually reached the mature implementation stage within 7 years. This study contributes to the literature by reporting a best practice of BL institutional adoption. Three implications, relating to strategy, structure, and support, were drawn to shed light for other institutions in moving forward on BL adoption.