OLC Blended Learning Symposium – 2022 

In November 2002, at the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning, a small group of higher education professionals were discussing a new phenomenon: faculty were mixing face-to-face and online learning instructional techniques in their courses. This new approach to teaching and learning was distinct from both fully F2F and online learning. Faculty members combined their own “blend” of preferred classroom technologies and a range of “on campus” meetings, ranging from once a week sessions to biweekly and monthly meetings. The first Sloan-C workshop on blended learning grew from this discussion and was launched the following year. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, it was held in April 2003 at the University of Illinois-Chicago with roughly 30 in attendance. During the two day event, while attendees had difficulty agreeing on a unified definition of blended learning, they did agree that it was likely to significantly impact higher education and that more conversation and research was needed. This small community continued to grow with yearly Sloan-C Blended Learning workshops until the final event in 2015, which had roughly 600-700 attendees. 

Since that time, blended learning has continued to be a vital topic at OLC conferences, in research featured in our flagship journal, the Online Learning Journal, and in offerings such as the Administration of Blended Programs Scorecard. However, the pandemic has fundamentally changed the landscape of higher education and accelerated the trend toward not just blended learning classes, but blended programs and institutions as well. In early 2021, Mary Niemiec, then OLC Board of Directors president, convened a Blended Learning Task Force to examine how OLC might expand its offerings to best serve the growing BL community. Chaired by Dr. Elizabeth Ciabocchi, the committee was formed by OLC BOD members and staff and OLC members at large who were experts in various aspects of BL. The 2022 Blended Learning Symposium (BLS) was launched based on the recommendations of that BL task force (BLS Welcome Presentation, 2022).

During the 2022 BLS at Accelerate in Orlando, Florida, an open call was made for participants to contribute to a collaborative notes document that would capture the outcomes, topics, themes, and conversations that occurred during both the virtual and on-site BLS. This report is the outcome of these collaborative notes and is broadly intended to serve as a living memory of the BLS. The themes below arrose from a collaborative coding process by which OLC staff and volunteer collaborators inductively coded the BLS and AC22 blended learning sessions along with archivist notes from the BLS to create major categories. Next, a participatory writing process was undertaken to create this report, where the contributors to the archivist documents were subsequently invited to co-author this report. Volunteer collaborators were divided into writing teams who, over the course of three full-day writing retreats and three weeks of asynchronous writing, produced this document. The OLC community is incredibly grateful for the contributing authors for sharing their time and expertise to produce this report that highlights trends in blended learning and research highlighted during  the symposium. Their participation ensured that we include a range of perspectives and voices in capturing the opportunities and challenges facing blended learning scholars and practitioners. In what follows, our contributing authors review eight trends that emerged during the symposium presentations and audience Q&As.