ABSTRACT
Budget austerity and the associated teaching load increases over the past half-decade have critically affected the local state-funded college and university system. At the College of Business, the number of enrolled declared students has increased by 16%, while the average student-to-faculty ratio has doubled from about 20 to 40. The increased load has led to larger section sizes. In order to maintain manageable sizes for the core and concentration courses, signicant increases in size have been made to prerequisite course sections, with the resulting deterioration of traditional face-toface interaction between the students and the instructor. Fortunately, over the same period, the text publisher for this course had been developing and enhancing a text-oriented Web site for students to learn online through solving generated problems. The site eventually provided feedback showing correct solutions upon request, but did not provide instruction in conceptual principles. The course thus evolved into a hybrid or blended learning course. The former term is falling out of use, and the meaning of the latter term is controversial as being imprecise. Blended learning is used here to indicate that a mix of media is employed. The blended combination of media for teaching classroom environments considered here is traditional face-to-face lecturing and instruction, text, and the interactive web-based online text-oriented site provided by the publisher.
