1. Introduction

A recent study involving 113,035 students across 13 countries conducted by the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research found that blended learning environments persists as the preferred learning modality even when students are beginning to experiment with fully online open enrollment courses such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) (Dahlstrom et al. in ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology, EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research, Louisville, 2013). This chapter begins by presenting the various definitions used by scholars to characterize blended learning, ranging from a very board definition that encompasses almost multiple learning methods or techniques, to one that narrows it down to the integration of online and face-to-face components. Specifically, in this book, we used the following definition of blended learning, adapted from Horn and Staker (The rise of K-12 blended learning, Innosight Institute, CA, 2011): “blended learning is any time a student learns at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and at least in part through the Internet with some element of student control over time, place, and/or pace”. This chapter then discusses the reason why blended learning is increasingly being adopted by many educators by outlining its four main benefits: an ability to meet students’ educational needs, improving student-to-student communication, reducing the average overall per-student cost, and improving student learning outcomes as well as lowering attrition rates. More importantly, this chapter argues that the success of blended learning does not happen automatically, just because an online component is added to a face-to-face environment. Ultimately, the success or failure of blended learning hinges on a thoughtful connection between how the online and face-to-face components are integrated, the types of pedagogical approaches employed, and how all these elements are ‘blended’ together to attain the specific learning goals. This chapter ends by presenting a blended learning design framework that emerged from a recent study of seven experienced blended learning designers, along with a description of the various frameworks or taxonomies utilized in this book to classify the different types of pedagogies, cognitive processes of learning, and/or levels of affective learning.