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Why Blended Learning Isn’t an Option Anymore

Broad Lessons from a Professor and his Study in Dental Education

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Despite having the majority of the world’s best colleges and universities, studies show that, on average, American colleges are far from the best in the world. Meanwhile, many students graduate with crushing piles of debt—the average Class of 2016 graduate has $37,173 in student loan debt.

And that’s if they’re even able to complete their degree. Of the millions of American college students who matriculate each year, less than half ever graduate, and the figure drops even lower at community colleges. Today’s college students face lifetime caps on financial aid and required remedial courses stemming from inadequate preparation—nearly 70% of students forced to take developmental courses never complete college. There’s also the often-overlooked difficulties of navigating the college experience, which can include balancing a job, schoolwork, and a homelife in an impossibly busy schedule.

More money is often thought to be the solution, but this seems to miss the greater problem: a fundamentally imperfect education model that is not properly serving the unique and diverse needs of an ever-changing student body.

Numerous theories exist as to how to address the issue, but according to Spyridon Varthis, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D. a researcher at Columbia University’s College of Dental Medicine and Teachers College, one possible solution is just recognizing those unique diversities.

“Each one of us has different needs that need to be focused on,” Varthis says. “Technology has changed the way we learn, the way we deliver and obtain information. While many of us have seen exceptional results from traditional face-to-face learning, we have an opportunity to enhance and even transform the best traditional methods and adapt a flexible education that personalizes to student experiences.”

The U.S. higher education system isn’t the unequivocal success we tend to think it is.

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While individually tailored education is easier said than done, according to Varthis, one answer may lie in the practice of “blended learning,” the focus of his recent research co-published in the European Journal of Dental Education with O. R. Anderson titled “Students’ perceptions of a blended learning experience in dental education.”

Blended learning can be described as, “a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace and at least in part at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home.” Or, more simply, blended learning is a mix of at-home and in-class learning that takes advantage of online and digital resources to allow students to learn at their own pace.

A dentist specialized in Prosthodontics and a medical dental educator by trade, Varthis became interested in blended learning after earning his Ph.D. from Columbia University and working in the faculty at New York University. “I was trying to figure out a way to specialize learning, because each one of us learns differently,” he says.

Varthis noticed that most of the time—especially in scientific education like dentistry or medicine—a professor would

teach the material in a certain way, so the all the students had to learn it in that certain way. This left little room to account for different students’ learning needs and assumed every student would be able to grasp the material equally, regardless of their preferred learning styles.

“Common practice in a dental school is the professor to give an hour lecture to the students in an amphitheater. Considering that 370 students [in the NYU dentistry program] attend that course, I am not confident that all of them will be focused and engaged during the one hour presentation,” Varthis says. “And most of the time, students are very tired [because of their heavy workload], which diminishes their ability to fully engage in learning. Obtaining the lecture in students’ own time, pace, and place would probably be more beneficial for these students.”

Intrigued by blended learning and the options it presented to rethink traditional lecture-centric teaching and learning, Varthis set out to understand it better through research into students’ perceptions of blended learning and how it affected their learning.

Ditching the Lecture for Blended Instruction and a More Engaging Learning Experience

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For his study, Varthis had 20 students (out of a random group of 40 chosen for the experiment) learn via blended learning. Before their first class, the students accessed a 45-minute video of a lecture “Introduction to Maxillofacial Prosthetics” through Schoology, a cloud-based learning management system, which also housed PowerPoint slides of the lecture, PDFs, and links to external resources. Then, for the in-class session, instead of presenting a standard lecture, the lecturer briefly recapped the material and answered all questions that students had on the pre-class video. This was then followed by group discussion aimed at problem-solving.

By giving the students the learning materials beforehand, Varthis noted that the students could learn “on their own

time, at their own pace, and in their own space.” Whereas with a normal lecture, “students don’t really have the time or the option to apply the information that they learn,” Varthis notes, in the blended learning model, the class “had more time to go in-depth into the information and apply the information.” And it seems to have paid off.

“One of the students told me ‘That was fun, especially the group problem solving.’ They told me that it was fun and that they learned,” Varthis says. “This is how they understood that they actually absorbed the information and that it was useful and meaningful learning.”

Beyond just anecdotal evidence, using data from Likert surveys obtained from before and after the blended

How Blended Learning Affects the Student Experience

Likert item correlation pre-survery network. Solid lines — background linkage; dashed lines — overlapping linkages (dashes used to prevent confusion by crossing over solid lines)

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learning experience, Varthis and Anderson constructed item correlation network diagrams, or ICNDs, to visualize both how the group of students thought about the various classroom aspects and how they thought as a group solving problems. The more connections between each node of the ICND, the more the students have demonstrated connections to each other and the material. The first ICND maps out the group’s pre-blended learning Likert correlations; the second is post blended learning.

According to Varthis and Anderson’s paper, “Overall, the combined data from the statistical analysis of the Likert-scale data and the ICNDs indicate a major change towards a positive stance in the students’ perceptions of the quality of the blended learning experience from the pre- to the post-learning assessment, and a more richly linked network of percepts in the ICND as a result of the blended learning experience.”

Or, as Varthis says, “It’s a visualization of how they think as a group. At the beginning, it’s how each student thinks. Individual Likert scales represent an individual’s cognition. But at the end, we are able to see group cognition or perceptions by looking at the correlations among them. If items have sufficient correlations, meaning there is shared cognition, we make a network diagram. This shows how cognition and social cognition is organized and how it changes.”

Given the real-world applications of the class material, Varthis noted that it’s critical for students to develop their problem solving skills as well as their ability to work in teams and help their fellow classmates. Throughout the blended learning study, Varthis found that the constant student-to-student interaction meant that stronger students could help others who didn’t feel as comfortable with the material, which led to an overall richer classroom.

Likert item correlation post-survery network. Solid thin lines — prior linkages solid thick lines — new linkages dashed thick lines — new overlapping linkages (dashes used to prevent confusion by crossing over solid lines)

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Although Varthis’s study was focused on dental education, he is confident that blended learning has applications in many other fields of study, especially ones that require a mix of theoretical course work and real world applications. “With the same concept of having students focusing on their needs, with different paces and different style learnings, I can, of course, see this in other fields as well.”

Soon, Varthis plans to continue his research to gain deeper insights into why the students felt these changes (as noted in the ICDN). He is also working on a project to understand dental students’ perceptions of treating special needs patients and how to better train them for such interactions.

In the meantime, Varthis is bullish about blended learning and what its wider adoption could mean for students. Through blended learning, Varthis found students more eager to learn and to work with their peers.

“For me, the most surprising finding,” Varthis explains, “was the increased motivation from the students to participate in the problem solving activity and to gain an in-depth knowledge of the subject. This contributed to students’ collaboration towards common goals.”

“Blended learning is about collaboration,” he continues. “We learn through collaboration; we learn with each other. Collaboration builds understanding of complex problems through exchanging information. I think blended learning has an important role in that.”

A Need for Blended Learning Throughout Higher Education

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Want to see the LMS Spyros Varthis used to enhance student experiences? Watch our video walkthroughs of Schoology’s LMS.

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About the Author

Matt Essert Freelance Writer and EditorMatt is a writer and editor who works in the communications industry out of New York City. He originally hails from the Great White North.