1    A Critique of Course-Delivery Strategies Implemented by Canadian Universities

Michael Power

Traditional campus-delivered graduate-level education has a long history during which voice was prioritized as a medium of communication through the seminar method (Jaques, 2000), whereas distance education, evolving through several generations, mainly targeted undergraduate studies and was largely text-based (Rowntree, 1994). As the 21st century advances, questions arise as to the role of text (e.g., asynchronous discussion forums) and voice (e.g., synchronous audio discussion) in graduate online learning (OL) and blended learning (BL): Are both text and voice necessary in OL/BL courses? How do faculty and students currently use both? How have Canadian universities been reaching out to off-campus graduate students, and what technologies have they been implementing in course delivery? These are just a few of the questions guiding the writing of this chapter. As Zawacki-Richter and Anderson (2014) state, there is a “strong imbalance” in the distance education and online learning literature: “The micro-perspective (teaching and learning in distance education) is highly over-represented,” whereas “other important areas (e.g., costs and benefits, innovation and change management, or intercultural aspects of distance learning) are dreadfully neglected” (p. 5).

The goal of this chapter is thus to lift the veil on the mechanics of OL/BL specifically with regard to the complementary roles of text and voice as implemented by universities in graduate programs across Canada (Bates, 2016). This represents a major challenge, as data on such is often hidden within internal reports, white papers, and memos, even in online course guides designed by administrators and support staff for internal use, aimed at their faculty transitioning online. As a result, information is generally not widely available, especially to outsiders. Some learning management system sites also contain instructions and guidelines, but much remains unshared and thus unknown. Yet the stakes could not be higher as OL and BL are quickly becoming the main means of course delivery for university programs, especially those aimed at professional development. Indeed, according to Kelly (2019), “nearly nine in 10 faculty members (87 percent) at colleges and universities across the country [the United States] said they are using either fully online or a mix of online and face-to-face instruction in their courses” (para. 1). In Canada, the numbers are virtually the same according to Donovan, Seaman, and Bates (2019, p. 6): “85% of responding institutions offering at least some online learning for credit in 2016.” Bad choices or those unenlightened by research can result in universities investing large amounts of funding in implementing an OL/BL strategy that does not leverage institutional strengths while ignoring weaknesses. A huge burden can be imposed on administrators and especially on faculty should an inappropriate strategy be implemented. For instance, courses designed to be front-end heavy may not be the best choice since they usually require institutions to incur high-level design, development, and delivery costs (Reiser & Dempsey, 2018). Such courses generally do not leverage existing institutional strengths, such as a great wealth of knowledge expertise among faculty, but rather require a cadre of design staff, which is a known institutional weakness in dual-mode universities (DMUs) (Power, 2008). In addition, given that, at the graduate level, content volatility in academic fields (i.e. content that is subject to sudden change, review, and/or revision) is quite high, institutions must think carefully before devoting resources in attempt to set the contents of these fields in stone (Dijkstra, 2000).

With regard to BL, requiring students to come on campus, even for part of their course, may not be a pedagogically valid and strategically viable choice (Boelens, De Wever, & Voet, 2017). Some questions that should be raised are as follows: To what extent does BL obviate the need and subsequent cost of OL? What is the impact of BL on access to higher education? Such considerations may be especially important for decision makers in higher education at a time when Canadian universities are struggling financially amid government cutbacks and claw backs (Usher, 2018). Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that a lot is riding on how universities design, develop, and deliver OL/BL in general and, within the scope of this book, specifically with regard to graduate studies.

A Paucity of Research

I begin this discussion with a global overview of how universities have, over time, implemented courses and programs through the application of educational technology in order to increase access to their graduate programs while attempting to maintain quality and cost-effectiveness. This particular aspect of higher education is, sadly, sorely lacking in documented studies specifically on DMUs, yet this is not the case for distance education offered at single-mode universities (Daniel, Kanwar, & Uvalić-Trumbić, 2009; Rumble, 2014). Indeed, such initiatives at DMUs have often been the result of individual university administrations, acting singly rather than as a province-wide system, and often falling below the radar of scientific inquiry.

I position this chapter at the nexus of two fields and two respective subfields of inquiry in higher education (HE). There are a large number and a variety of subfields of research in HE, and many of them overlap. In Figure 1.1, the identified subfields of inquiry continuing education (and related terms) and educational technology are seen as being independent yet overlapping and intersecting when it comes to graduate studies and online learning, which also overlap and intersect. It is the nexus of these subfields that is of particular interest and concern to me (e.g., research dealing with OL from an educational technology perspective and graduate studies from a continuing education perspective). I have yet to find one publication that deals squarely with this nexus of inquiry within the context of Canadian DMUs—that is, universities that deliver courses both on campus and online.

Outreach

Universities offering traditional, on-campus HE have a long history of technologically enhanced, decentralization strategies—or outreach strategies, as I term them—especially at the undergraduate level, whereas graduate-level courses pose particular challenges, which I will explore later. In Figure 1.2, I present a view of the term outreach within the context of HE and its attendant pressures.

Outreach occurs in the form of programs and services offered by universities to their respective communities and, increasingly, to an international academic community via OL. Given projections for growth in HE worldwide (Sarrico, McQueen, & Samuelson, 2017), institutions are under pressure to not only increase access to their programs and services but also to maintain quality, improve cost-effectiveness, and even demonstrate impact and relevance. This, of course, places them in a bind, captives of the “iron triangle” (Daniel, Kanwar, & Uvalić-Trumbić, 2009).

Sir John Daniel has held many important positions in distance education, from vice-chancellor of the British Open University (BOU) to UNESCO’s assistant director-general, and he has been a vocal proponent for lifelong learning by increasing access to HE worldwide, especially among underprivileged and underserved populations. Daniel et al. (2009) have very precisely analyzed the crisis of access that has befallen institutions of HE, especially in developed nations. In short, they focus on three variables that are in dynamic interplay: access, quality, and cost. To break out of what he termed an iron triangle, Daniel et al. (2009) state that they see no other way than for governments and national departments of HE to change profoundly the way institutions are currently functioning, from the ground up, ushering in reforms that would make distance education the modus operandi of all institutions (see Figure 1.3).

In Daniel’s analysis, attempts to break out of this iron triangle unavoidably result in one or more of the variables, all necessary, being reduced, diminished, neglected, or, in the case of cost, increased.

Guri-Rosenblit (2014) has characterized the current period as one that involves a large variety of OL providers all seeking “the golden triangle between wide access to higher education, high-quality learning, and economies of scale” (p. 123). In an earlier article (Power & Morven-Gould, 2011), my co-author and I proposed linking these variables to specific stakeholders and their priorities in an attempt to better understand this crisis and find an alternative solution to Daniel’s dilemma. I will now examine how universities have attempted to break out of the iron triangle via various outreach strategies, some being more successful than others, yet all falling short of what is required to achieve a complete breakout, especially in terms of scale.

Breakout Attempts

Correspondence Courses (First-Generation DE)

The first alternative to campus-based teaching had rather humble beginnings at the University of London, starting in 1858. This first attempt was undergraduate correspondence education, a limited, text-based option for off-campus students who were usually enrolled in what has been termed independent studies (Scott, 1999). In the late 1800s, this form of outreach spread across the Atlantic to take root in the United States at universities such as the University of Chicago (Moore & Kearsley, 2011). However, actual enrolment numbers were low, and, as a result, few courses were ever offered, due in part to resistance from faculty and administration in mainstream universities. In short, the impact of correspondence courses on HE as a whole was fringe at best in terms of numbers, yet such courses can be seen as the seed that would, a century later, sprout and grow into the first open universities, but not before universities tried out other pioneering uses of mass media.

Distance Education via Educational Radio and Television (Second-Generation DE)

As these non-print mass medias first became available in the 1920s and 1930s, universities, namely in North America, tried adopting them for outreach purposes, squarely aimed at adult education (see Keast, 2005). A departure from correspondence courses, these courses brought voice back into the classroom—albeit one-way, not two-way, voice—first in the form of broadcasts and, decades later, in the form of recordings, leveraging a major faculty strength: oral exposition (Buck, 2006).

According to Rosenberg (2001), such unidirectional voice-based courses lacked a key ingredient, which has remained missing right up until computer-based training: interaction with and among students. Without it, courses operated more as vehicles of information than vessels of knowledge development. Moreover, because such initiatives were often seen by university administrators as peripheral to their core target population—and thus to their core activities—funding was always an issue.

As a result, these courses became associated with university extension services that worked—and, in many cases, still work—on a cost recovery basis. Similar to correspondence education, courses offered “over the air” remained few in number and immune from input by traditional academia (Keegan, 1996, 2008). Yet, once again, the lessons learned from such endeavours were not lost on the politicians behind the creation of the BOU.

It is important to mention the role of film and the film projector in training during this period; the prodigious inventor Thomas Edison was quoted as saying that “books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture” (as cited in Saettler, 1990, p. 141). This, of course, has not happened. Moreover, I cannot include film among the main technologies used in HE; its use has been more prevalent in the military, government, and corporate America (see Williams, 1944). University outreach attempts, modest at best, were always made with the undergraduate student in mind. This is understandable as graduate education was still in its infancy (Jones, 2014) and generally restricted to society’s elite, although the effects of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” would, in the 1960s, begin to reverberate across all of North America.

The British Open University (Third-Generation DE)

The BOU, opened in 1969, was, to put it frankly, a game changer, at least in the United Kingdom, where systemic barriers to HE were legendary. The BOU was, from its beginning, a political animal, what many saw as a made-to-measure, left-wing ideological dagger aimed at the heart of right-wing elitist HE (Anderson, 1995; Perry, 1976; see also Haines, 1998; The Open University, n.d.). As such, it aroused deep resentment, even ridicule, in more conservative circles. Yet it managed to survive—even prosper—on its own, despite severe and prolonged resistance from traditional academia (Perry, 1976). The BOU incarnated the application of industrial principles, such as the division and specialization of labour, to a yet-untried sector: the university system (Peters, 1967). An example of this is seen in its unique learner support system composed of tutors, initially in touch with learners over the phone, then at “study centers” and, more recently, via online communications (Sewart, 1995). The BOU, with its singular character, that of an upstart institution within a staid academic community, was a cheeky response to an iron-clad system, steeped in a tradition of social injustice, and its success was a testimony to the tenacity of its founders, the intelligence of its faculty, and the determination of its students. Technologically, the BOU combined all earlier forms of distance education—that is, text-heavy correspondence courses plus voice-based radio and television (Wrigley, 2017) —yet it innovated by introducing course packages including instructionally designed, conversational-style written materials. Teaming up with the BBC, its radio and television broadcasts became legendary, even cultural, icons. Later, audio and then videotape recordings were added to courses, although most of the material produced was, and remains, text-based.

A major impediment to adopting such an industrial-based system by mainstream universities was the considerable amount of front-end design—and hence front-end capital—required to produce market-ready courses; indeed, a rather extensive, specialized “course team” (a BOU innovation) was needed to do so—a capital investment well beyond the means of most universities. If one enquires into the instructional designer–to–professor ratio at any mainstream university, even nowadays, it will be found to be woefully far from the norm established by the open university system needed to allow course teams to design and develop quality online courses (Riter, 2016).

Initially dubbed second-chance universities by their critics, open universities nonetheless often performed—and continue to perform—on par with mainstream universities (Powell & Keen, 2006). This model of university was based on a truly foreign infrastructure in HE—that of an industrial production line—and the open university faculty workload is quite different from that of mainstream university faculty in that the DE teaching component is completely unbundled, separating course design from course delivery. To wit, as a rule, open university faculty never come in contact with students; their tutors do, despite some recent “blurring of boundaries” (Guri-Rosenblit, 2014, p. 114). In brief, mainstream universities were simply incapable of such dramatic change in a millennial milieu where tradition and collegial management was the norm. Therefore, despite Daniel et al.’s (2009) predictions, even exhortations, it can be stated unequivocally that, for numerous reasons, distance education never did go mainstream in HE (Moore & Kearlsey, 2011), and it likely never shall, per se.

Video Conferencing (Technology Enhanced Learning)

As open university–generated, text-dominated distance education was stymied by doubts about quality among faculty (Perry, 1976) and seen as prohibitively costly by administrators (Bates, 1995; Reiser, 2001), pressure nevertheless continued to mount for increased access to HE, and economic forces pushed universities to offer more accessible graduate programs. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, new initiatives implementing newly available ISDN (high capacity) telephone lines began to pop up throughout North America as many universities created satellite campuses.

Voice-based video conferencing (VC) technology extended the traditional classroom to these remote campuses, especially as the need for increased graduate education occurred, thereby offering students greater access to courses and programs. These initiatives attempted to leverage known faculty strengths such as oral exposition and direct interaction with students while avoiding costly design and development of upfront course materials. Despite promising beginnings, VC’s high initial cost of purchase and ongoing costs were impediments to adoption. The nail in VC’s coffin, for faculty on the ground—and instructional designers such as myself working in support of them—was the frequent technical glitches that made teaching (and supporting faculty) a more than usual harrowing experience (Berge & Muilenberg, 2001; Power, Dallaire, Dion, & Théberge, 1994). Ultimately, VC became quickly redundant, an ephemeral technology; once the Internet hit the mainstream in the mid-1990s, video conferencing became web conferencing.

Two other technologically enhanced instructional systems were implemented by universities to a limited degree during the 1980s as part of their outreach strategy and deserve a mention: computer-based training (CBT, sometimes known as computer-based instruction) and audiographics, sometimes called “audiographic teleconference” or even “telematics” at the time. (Since the 1980s, the term telematics [from the French télématique] has taken on a more encompassing meaning, going beyond its original meaning of transferring information through telecommunications.) There were two main differences between these technologies: the former was an offline technology, mainly implemented by business, and the was latter an online technology—though limited, a precursor to the web—more implemented by universities. CBT seemed to hold great promise: the floppy disks contained content, drills, and exercises; yet, in fact, they were often “deadly dull” (Rosenberg, 2001, p. 22).

Audiographics/telematics arrived just prior to the World Wide Web, especially represented by France’s Minitel (Mailland & Driscoll, 2017); it combined audioconferencing and computer-sharing capabilities, ideal for DE. But, by the 1990s, the powerful web tsunami swept away everything before it, rendering the most advanced technologies of the day immediately obsolete and levelling the playing field, technologically speaking. The Web thus brings us to the next major outreach strategy: online learning.

Online Learning

Thus far, we have seen a clear oscillation between the dominance of text-based resources as opposed to that of voice-based interaction in outreach strategies adopted by universities; clearly both are needed, yet none of the above-mentioned strategies have allowed for an equal amount of either to distance learners. As depicted in Figure 1.4, in traditional, on-campus teaching, the general tendency was, and continues to be, largely and primarily voice-based instruction. First-generation DE is seen here as a swing of the HE pendulum completely to the other side, represented as a polarization from set-time and set-place instruction to anytime, anywhere instruction. Furthermore, I posit that second-generation DE is characterized by a swing back towards traditional instruction (TRAD), in that voice-based educational radio and television became the main means of course delivery. The advent of the open university, “industrial” tradition in 1969 (third-generation DE) brought about yet another swing of the pendulum, this time back towards the dominance of text as a medium of instruction; yet it was not exclusively so, in that, as mentioned above, second-generation DE technologies, newly invigorated with recording capacity, continued to figure prominently in open university course materials.

OL (Figure 1.4) represents, in my view, a swing back towards TRAD, in that DMUs generally implement it in a way that reflects their existing cohort model, as opposed to the “open” (as in ongoing) enrolment policy implemented by open universities. As OL developed within DMU, it included, much like campus-based courses, group work and teamwork, as opposed to the usual individual-based instruction of the open university model. Hence, we can see an ongoing oscillation in course design and delivery strategies as universities search for the “right” outreach strategy. It should be noted that the introduction of OL mainly targets undergraduate education, because enrolment levels provide the budget for upfront course design and development, whereas lower graduate education enrolment numbers often prevent OL’s adoption, unless upfront design and development are kept to a minimum.

It appears reasonable to say that OL once again brought text to the forefront at the expense of voice, a form of automation technology designed to replace human interaction. Viable in mainstream HE by the mid-1990s, OL was characterized by asynchronous, text-based communications, the primary means of communication between students and faculty, but more often between students and teaching assistants. On the one hand, HE outreach took a great leap forward when general access to the Internet allowed for large-scale OL deployment (Harasim, 1993), but, on the other hand, it can equally be advanced that it took a great leap backwards in terms of spontaneous and instantaneous interaction between regular faculty and students (Maerof, 2015).

In the case of OL, the primacy of text was a logical continuation of the distance education tradition, as established by the industrially organized open university movement (Keegan, 1996). As Harasim (2011) has stated, “Most commonly, the discourse is text-based and asynchronous” (p. 87). Indeed, it was undisputedly the best means for dispensing the greatest number of courses outside campus; yet it had its limits, namely, exceedingly high costs to achieve quality. In the same way that first-, second-, and even third-generation distance education students felt isolated and experienced various difficulties both socially and academically (Kember, 1995; Tinto, 1975), OL brought with it a new generation of learners experiencing far too high a level of isolation for it to succeed completely (Abrami & Bures, 1996).¹ Described as a solitary path to learning, especially in light of Generation Y’s need for peer contact (Price, 2009), OL was often seen as a cookie-cutter approach to course development (see Kelly, n.d.). As Anderson (2008) has stated in promoting a new, more interactive form of DE, “teachers are no longer confined to the construction of monolithic packages that are not easily modified in response to student need” (p. 296). Yet it is hard to get sound data on these movements, as research dealing with the use of technology in education has not always been completely objective. Indeed, Burge, Hara, and Kling (1999) stated that “most of the literature on CMC (computer-mediated communication) in higher education is ‘cautious optimism to hyperbole’” (p. 16), as witnessed by the rise of the “digital learning evangelist” (Kim, 2018).

When you ask instructional designers why faculty become engaged in OL, you may receive a variety of answers (Potvin, Power, & Ronchi, 2014). On the one hand, maybe faculty are committed, philosophically, to extending access to HE and are thus “believers” in OL. On the other hand, they might simply be trying to find a way to escape the drudgery of the classroom by creating a mega-course, the responsibility for which can subsequently be delegated to teaching assistants and that requires but little supervision on his or her part (Power & Vaughan, 2010). The latter reason would naturally allow the faculty member to better pursue their research interests—a rather tempting scenario for most researchers. This is, of course, somewhat speculative on my part, as hard empirical data is difficult to come by, yet 30 years of observation into faculty practices in HE does fill one’s mind with hypotheses.

Despite some early successes, institutions quickly realized that regular faculty were resistant to rapid online deployment (Shea, Pickett, & Li, 2005) and often had to have recourse to adjunct faculty in order to get courses online (Sammons, Ruth, & Poulin (2007). Indeed, many faculty felt that OL was incompatible with their teaching styles and were often overwhelmed by student expectations of rapid feedback (Shea et al., 2005). Faculty expressed concerns that the quality of their didactic relationships was impaired by stand-alone, asynchronous (i.e., text) communications (McBrien & Jones, 2009). Moreover, OL, despite its increased flexibility as compared with campus-based courses, was also accompanied by a higher faculty workload, with much higher levels of labour-intensive written communications (Goldman, 2011).

In 1981, Fuller coined the term knowledge doubling curve, the idea being that knowledge has been doubling at an increasingly rapid pace (Fuller, 1981, p. 347)—some even say every 12 hours (Schilling, 2013). What this means for educators is that content volatility (a concept strangely absent from current academic inquiry into OL) will have a huge impact on which courses get developed for text-based online delivery and which will not. Indeed, content stability was once (when DE was the main alternative means of delivery in HE) considered by distance educators to be the ultimate litmus test of whether or not a course would, or could, be deemed a worthy object for course teams (Keegan, 1996). The greater the content stability in a course, the more likely it became a worthy object for DE development. Yet graduate education, as compared with undergraduate education, has, ipso facto, the more volatile of contents, being necessarily more state-of-the-art research informed than more stable undergraduate linked content is. As a result, I would argue that heavily text-based, time-consuming, front-end designed OL appears to not be a viable option for graduate-level online courses, despite the fact that many Canadian universities do design, develop, and deliver such.² To address this dilemma, in the early 2000s, universities began taking a step back from OL and experimenting with blended learning (BL), thus prompting yet another swing of the pendulum (Bonk & Graham, 2006; Garrison & Vaughan, 2008).

Before moving on to BL, I give a nod to massive open online courses (MOOCs), what I would term a “flash-in-the-pan” phenomenon, nonetheless notoriously affecting OL. When MOOCs hit mainstream academia in the early 2000s, they did so as a tsunami strikes a rocky shore: there were equal amounts of surprise, dismay, and disbelief, and many people naturally lost their footing. The techno-pedagogical community started asking, are these even “courses” (Zemsky, 2014)? Is a course simply an inventory of resources, such as texts, clips, slides, and so on? Does a course not entail some form of institutionally responsible learner support, beyond mere sporadic and ill-adapted peer-to-peer interaction?

Is a course a course when learner support is reduced to, at best, occasional tutorial support or, at worst, unfettered and unsupervised peer support, with peers usually emanating from all corners of the planet, being highly diversified in terms of background and knowledge? The literature has been replete with statistics on non-completion rates (Jordan, 2014), and MOOCs, in becoming a synonym for OL, did more to discredit OL in the few short years they dominated the headlines than a half century of critique levelled at the single-mode distance education universities. Their appearance has likely set OL back a decade in terms of acceptance and expansion, despite OL’s limitations as identified above.

Blended Learning

As the limitations of text-dominant OL began to become apparent and its non-adoption by regular faculty a common stance (Chapman, 2011; Mitchell, Parlamis, & Claiborne, 2014; Wallace, 2007), blended learning (BL) entered the lexicon of theorists (Bonk & Graham, 2006; Garrison & Vaughan, 2008) and subsequently the arena of HE.

In Figure 1.5, BL is portrayed as a compromise strategy of sorts, a politically correct swing in the direction of regular faculty who remained adamantly pro-campus and a politically progressive nod in the direction of online innovators intent on changing the status quo through the introduction of disruptive technologies (Christensen, 1997)—hence something for everyone. It was, in my view, a swing back to voice dominance in course delivery.

In hindsight, the emergence of BL appears to be linked to two concomitant movements, one the result of pushback from faculty with regard to OL, especially with regard to MOOCs. BL appeared in HE about the same time that MOOCs were gathering strength; these text-dominated “massive courses” were seen by many faculty as the ultimate “massification” (see IGI Global, n.d.) of HE, the emergence of the universal mega-professor (Zemsky, 2014). What better to send chills up the spine of an academic (see Kolowich, 2013)? In this light, BL likely seemed more appealing to faculty as a more sustainable form of teaching. The other movement was a sudden realization among university administrators that BL could allow them to decongest their campuses (Owston, York, & Murtha, 2013). DMUs thus started envisaging a compromise between voice-dominant campus-based courses and text-dominant online courses, the result being, as seen in Figure 1.5, some form of BL (Taylor, Vaughan, Ghani, Atas, & Fairbrother, 2018).

The advantage of such an approach was purportedly that faculty could add a new dimension of flexibility to their teaching without taking on too much additional workload by implementing a limited form of OL (Gregory & Lodge, 2015). BL would also allow them to continue their usual practice of meeting students on campus, at least part of the time (Owston et al., 2013). Yet there was a caveat: Students not living close enough to a campus—actual distant learners—were simply left out of the equation, since at least some amount of on-campus seat time was required from them. In short, BL may have addressed the overly text-dominant approach characterized by OL, but it cancelled out previous advances made by DE through successive generations by requiring students to, once again, come to campus. A hundred and fifty years later, BL drew us back to the outreach drawing board.

Despite what I purport—that BL is incapable of meeting off-campus student needs because it reverts back to geographically based universities at a time when OL is making rapid inroads into academia—such is not always the case in the minds of administrators in major institutions. They have made, and continue to make, BL their university’s distinguishing characteristic, the axis around which most future developments will take place (Porter, Graham, Spring, & Welch, 2014). Even within the Canadian OL research community, BL is far from being relegated to the ash heap of history, likely given the scale of its implementation. It has always appeared strange to me that researchers have not highlighted this major limitation of BL. Have institutions already invested too much in BL initiatives to allow researchers to freely make inquiries into the actual day-to-day workings of this strategy and its impact on distant learners? I am left with only questions and speculation.

Blended Online Learning Design

As the Internet matured and broadband increased, almost exponentially, making Canada one of the most connected countries in the world, new synchronous-based technologies were being implemented by DMUs (Bower, Dalgarno, Kennedy, Lee, & Kenney, 2015; Power, 2008). Once again, a voice-based attempt was made to increase outreach beyond what other course delivery strategies could offer. As a result, the pendulum swung once more (Figure 1.6) as a new emphasis on voice began to emerge in online courses in order to provide yet more options to administrators, faculty, and graduate students (Power & Vaughan, 2010). Since these new combinations of synchronous voice-based technologies and asynchronous text-based technologies represented a departure from text-only OL, as well as partly campus-based, partly online BL, a new term was required in the literature, one that would adequately describe a new form of online teaching and learning. In 2008, I proposed blended online learning (BOL) to describe this new delivery strategy (Power, 2008). It was new in that it was a combination of web-based, text-dominant OL and voice-dominant BL. On the one hand, BOL allows students to complete part of their work online, anytime, anywhere. On the other, it provides students with an opportunity to exchange with peers and faculty in real time. However, rather than on campus, these exchanges take place via synchronous virtual classroom technology.

In that 2008 article, entitled “The Emergence of Blended Online Learning,” I describe the differences between DE, OL, BL, and BOL and argue in favour of the latter, specifically for graduate-level courses (Power, 2008). In “Head of Gold, Feet of Clay”(Power & Morven-Gould, 2011), my colleague and I argue that BOL offers a better balance between access, quality, and cost-effectiveness, also balancing faculty workload, student feedback expectations, and administrator limitations—something OL could not achieve. As opposed to BL, it was a complete 100% online solution. In hindsight, I now realize that, compared with the other course delivery strategies, BOL also created the best balance possible between text and voice with the least number of hindrances. Later publications saw this term evolve into blended online learning design, or BOLD (Morven-Gould & Power, 2015; Power & Morven-Gould, 2011; Power & St. Jacques, 2014; Power & Vaughan, 2010), as I began evolving towards a more constructivist learning design posture within the context of HE, as opposed to the more front-end posture of instructional design, which is more prevalent in the military and corporate sectors than in HE.

The asynchronous text-based component in BOLD is similar to, yet more limited than, a fully asynchronous online course. Thus, a BOLD course does not require substantial front-end design because it leverages existing faculty resources: a course syllabus, student activity planning, assigned readings, exams, and so on. As a result, the “asynchronous” part of a course is not stand-alone; it is one part of a given course, the synchronous component being just as important as the asynchronous. As for the synchronous voice-based component implemented via the virtual classroom, it leverages existing faculty skills, such as oral exposition, the Socratic method, group dynamics, and general interaction abilities learned from previous classroom management experience.

As graduate learners are often both practitioners and returning students, text-based communications alone are often insufficient in both scope and depth for satisfactory learner support (Rovai & Jordan, 2010). Moreover, as developments occur rapidly in the literature, faculty designing and delivering graduate courses simply do not have enough time to document everything in text form. Imagine having to transcribe everything that is said during a regular seminar! As a result, voice is an effective and complimentary tool to text (McBrien & Jones, 2009).

A BOLD course is characterized by a webinar design and delivery strategy emphasizing a balance between text and voice—that is, preparatory work in the form of text-based individual activities, followed by voice- and text-based interactive team assignments, which are subsequently followed up by real-time, voice-based exchanges in a virtual classroom space, focused on text-based course content (Power & St. Jacques, 2014). After 12 years of direct experience as a faculty member delivering BOLD courses, I have realized that, although scheduling real-time sessions can be challenging for a graduate-level student population (given that many are practising professionals), students do enrol in such courses, gladly. They say they are content with the newly found spatial freedom these courses allow (no longer having to come to campus as they would for BL-delivered courses) and quite willing to sacrifice temporal freedom in order to experience quality exchanges with peers and their professor and obtain instantaneous and spontaneous feedback (which is sorely lacking in OL). This has been my personal experience as well as the experience of numerous colleagues at my university who have adopted the BOLD strategy (Power & Lapointe, 2018). I have seen programs that were precariously close to being closed actually expand, their cohorts doubling within years. My colleagues and I have also heard what students tell us: BOLD-based courses are day, and asynchronous, text-based OL courses are night, so inhibiting is the degree of the latter’s isolation in terms of learning quality. It should be noted that BOLD-delivered courses are optimally delivered by universities to students living within a common time zone (such as in the province of Québec) or one time zone away.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have identified and candidly critiqued the various technologically enhanced outreach strategies implemented by universities over the past 150 years. This has been based on the existing literature as well as on my own professional teaching experience in HE, specifically in the field of educational technology and distance education/online learning. I have analyzed how each strategy prioritizes either voice or text, rarely both, and I have examined the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy, illustrating how the failures of one strategy have inexorably led to the emergence of another strategy, one deemed more satisfactory in meeting the needs not only of students but also of faculty and administrations. The last strategy I described, BOLD, should be seen as a strategy of compromise: In order to increase access, it implements complete online delivery, and in order to maintain quality, it leverages faculty’s greatest strength, voice, in the same way voice has been leveraged in the campus-based classroom for a millennium.

After over 20 years of applying BOLD as an outreach strategy, I have realized that it is a workable solution for busy academics who are often torn between devoting time to improving the quality of their teaching and working on their research program. It has also proven to be a solution for distant learners who have been isolated by OL or excluded by BL. Moreover, it solves the institutional problem raised by OL of funding costly front-end design by not requiring much more front-end design from faculty than they already provide in their on-campus courses. Given these advantages, and especially the avoidance of the disadvantages of the other outreach strategies, I would enjoin my fellow DE/OL/BL researchers to begin pilots in their institutions, applying BOLD at the graduate course level, in order to either further prove its relevance or disprove it, as per Zawacki-Richter and Anderson’s (2014) exhortation for more research on meso-level management, organization, and technology issues.

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1 Anderson and Garrison had a productive debate going in 2009–2010 about whether OL is a further generation of DE or a unique and distinct phenomenon (Anderson, 2009; Garrison, 2009). It would appear that the “jury is still out” on this, but I concur with Garrison in seeing it as having enough distinct characteristics to be regarded as a separate phenomenon rather than simply a new generation of DE.

2 It should be noted that single-mode universities (such as Athabasca University and Université TÉLUQ) tend to offer asynchronous-based graduate programs, whereas DMUs (such as Memorial University and Université Laval) tend, increasingly, to offer graduate programs that blend synchronous and asynchronous delivery modes.