Blended Learning As A Model of Teaching and Learning at University

The development of information and communication technology has a great effect on the management of education, especially at tertiary level. One of the forms of the impact is the way that students and lecturers communicate and interact each other in teaching and learning context.

In the past, teaching and learning activity was conducted mainly in the classroom, where the lecturers delivered their teaching materials manually using conventional teaching aids like a blackboard and an overhead projector. This traditional way of teaching and learning required the students and the lecturers to have a face-to-face meeting in the classroom, and the presence of the students in the meeting became one main prerequisite for the success of their study.

The invention of modern educational technology enables the students and the lecturers to manage teaching and learning more flexibly. The e-learning technology has provided the capacity for both asynchronous and synchronous human interaction.

However, as social creature, we still need direct meeting in learning transaction because there are some social and psychological aspects which cannot be effectively tackled by the technology. Blended learning, therefore, becomes an ideal model of teaching and learning in this modern era. It combines traditional face-to-face classroom methods with more modern computer-mediated activities.