A five-year study of sustaining blended learning initiatives to enhance academic engagement in computer and information sciences campus courses

In early 2007, the faculty and administration of the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences (GSCIS) at Nova Southeastern University discussed the need to adopt blended learning initiatives to extend support for our campus-based master’s students. The graduate school is committed to the university’s core belief that engagement is substantially tied to student learning and that the academic environment exists beyond the physical classroom and its class schedule. With this belief, we recognized the need to further engage students in the educational process by exploring various technology mechanisms for access and exchange to be used outside of the campus class. At the same time, blended learning was recognized as a relatively new instructional modality (Picciano, 2011), as few academic institutions, in general, had fully adopted blended learning or initiated blended learning in traditional class offerings. However, GSCIS has a long history of online learning and blended learning since 1983 (Dringus & Scigliano, 2000). GSCIS had pioneered its unique doctoral programs (in information science and other areas) using partdistance (computer-based) and part-campus (several cluster weekend meetings on site per year) as the instructional modality. In parallel, GSCIS has also offered various fully online master’s degree programs since 1986.