Foreword

When Jennifer Lock and Michael Power asked me to write this foreword, the invitation gave me the opportunity to pause and reflect on my career in teaching and researching blended and online learning and how my own journey intersects with themes covered in The Finest Blend. It prompted me to examine the evolution of online and blended learning as reported by 22 researchers working in nine French- and English-language Canadian universities in the chapters of this book.

In 1996, I was assigned to teach a graduate course on digital technology for teachers. We were scheduled to meet Monday through Friday for two hours daily for the month of July. I proposed that, instead of meeting on Fridays, we could have online discussions during the week. I polled the class, and to my surprise all but two teachers had access to a computer and modem at home. The two teachers who did not have a modem said that they could make arrangements with friends to go online. So history was made. I began teaching York University’s first partially online graduate course!

After having taught the course this way, what struck me was how successful this mode of teaching really was. I found that teachers were able to gain deeper insights into the topics that we were covering by having a chance to reflect on them and then discuss them with peers. What is more, this mode offered them a measure of flexibility in their personal schedules and made learning more convenient because they did not have to commute to campus on Fridays. Ever since that summer, with few exceptions, I have been teaching the course every year in the mode that later became known as blended learning.

While teaching the course that summer, I witnessed the rapid development of the World Wide Web. My first experience with the web was viewing photos of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. Prior to that, I had been using email, telnet, gopher, and file transfer protocol (FTP) and had heard only a bit of talk about a new protocol called the World Wide Web. I thought that the web had the potential to revolutionize education by moving away from the strictures of linear text and toward the use of hypertext and graphics to make learning more compelling, while offering students more learning options through online courses. I wrote “The World Wide Web: A Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning?” (Owston, 1997). This was the first publication in an American Educational Research Association journal that dealt with teaching and learning with the web. In the article, I posited three criteria that needed to be met in order to make the web a viable tool for teaching and learning: the web (1) had to facilitate improved learning, (2) make learning more accessible, and (3) reduce or at least contain the costs of courses.

In 1999, Stan Shapson, associate vice-president of strategic academic initiatives at York University, and I met at the University of Guelph with Virginia Gray, director of Guelph’s Office of Open Learning, and Tom Carey, who directed Waterloo University’s Learning and Teaching with Technology Centre. We discussed the idea of forming a consortium of pan-Canadian research-intensive universities to study online teaching and learning. We chose to name the consortium COHERE—Collaboration for Online Higher Education Research. For it to be truly pan-Canadian, we had to bring in other national partners. The University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, the University of Saskatchewan, York University, and Dalhousie University joined, and COHERE was formed. Over the 20 years, the membership of COHERE has changed, but its mission of advancing blended and online teaching and learning in Canada has not. This book emerged as part of a collaboration among a number of Canadian scholars who presented at the COHERE 2015 and 2016 conferences examining voice and text in online graduate programs. This book is the latest example of how the organization has accomplished its mission, in this case by linking 22 researchers from across Canada to examine in depth issues related to blended and online teaching and learning.

What impresses me about this book is the wide range of research on blended and online learning occurring in Canadian higher education. The authors provide overviews of current priority areas in terms of support of technology-enabled learning within graduate university contexts. They share research and practice as they examine instructional design in course development processes, open educational resources, institutional and programmatic supports for learners and teachers, program evaluation, and engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The methodologies shared in the book also vary greatly, including historical, ethnographical, auto-ethnographical, and survey research. It is evident from the chapters that we no longer need research to understand how blended and online learning compares to traditional face-to-face instruction, because blended learning has now become the “new normal” in higher education (Dziuban, Graham, Moskal, Norberg, & Socilia, 2018, p. 1). Our research now needs to examine how we can best use the affordances of technology-enabled learning.

In reading the chapters of this book, I believe that, together with the research of other leading Canadian scholars, a significant body of work on blended and online learning has now emerged in our country. I concur with Lock and Power in their conclusion to this book that blended and online technology has truly fostered a sense of academic pan-Canadianism.

Now that Canadian researchers have come together with the publication of this book, we must not lose the momentum. We know that technology is constantly evolving, and our research agendas must evolve as well. Three new areas likely to emerge in the next few years that will command our attention are open educational resources (OERs), learning analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). The challenge is to continue expanding the research agendas in these new areas within the Canadian university context. I look forward to the time when Canadian researchers come together again to produce a similar volume addressing these new challenges.

Ron Owston, York University

References

Dziuban, C., Graham, C. R., Moskal, P. D., Norberg, A., & Sicilia, N. (2018). Blended learning: The new normal and emerging technologies. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15(1), 1–16.

Owston, R. D. (1997). The World Wide Web: A technology to enhance teaching and learning? Educational Researcher, 26(2), 27–33.