"Blended" Learning

The phrase "Blended Learning" has come to represent an instructional approach which mixes face-to-face teaching with an online component. Michael B. Horn, one of the co-authors of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), has a good article and white paper about the increase in blended learning offerings here: http://www.innosightinstitute.org/media-room/publications/education-publications/the-rise-of-k-12-blended-learning/

In Disrupting Class, the authors project that by 2019, 50 percent of all high school courses will be delivered online. This pattern of growth is characteristic of a disruptive innovation—an innovation that transforms a sector characterized by products or services that are complicated, expensive, inaccessible, and centralized into one with products or services that are simple, affordable, accessible, convenient, and often customizable. Think personal computers, the iPod and mp3s, Southwest Airlines, and TurboTax. At the beginning of any disruptive innovation, the new technology takes root in areas of nonconsumption—where the alternative is nothing at all, so the simple, new innovation is infinitely better. More users adopt it as the disruptive innovation predictably improves.
...
In classic disruptive fashion, online learning is expanding beyond distance learning. Educators and entrepreneurs are increasingly creating blended-learning environments—where rather than doing the online learning at a distance, students learn online in an adult-supervised school environment for at least part of the time. At the outset, this occurred in areas of nonconsumption, such as credit-recovery labs and dropout-recovery schools. A small but growing number of schools, however, are now starting to introduce blended learning into their core programming for mainstream students.