Institutional Adoption and Implementation of Blended Learning in the Era of Intelligent Education

Abstract

Blended learning (BL) reform is one of the vital methods to improve the teaching quality of institutions in the intelligent education era. However, institutions are always faced with many obstacles (instructors’ reluctance/inability to change, etc.) in conducting the reform. What is worse, very few studies have reported the design and effect of such a transformation. This study designed an intervention of institutional BL reform by making a unified deployment based on Graham et al.’s BL adoption framework: identifying strategy, structure, and support issues at three developmental stages. More than 900 courses (involving more than 14,000 students and more than 2000 instructors) within S university were taken as a sample. A quasi-experiment was designed to investigate the effect of the intervention on S university’s BL course transformation, students’ learning, instructors’ professional development, etc. Course logs, responses to students’ course evaluation forms, and instructors’ questionnaires were collected and analyzed. Results indicated that S university systematically conducted the BL transformation and gradually reached the mature implementation stage within 7 years. This study contributes to the literature by reporting a best practice of BL institutional adoption. Three implications, relating to strategy, structure, and support, were drawn to shed light for other institutions in moving forward on BL adoption.

1. Introduction

Entering the era of intelligent education, instructors have found that conventional teaching approaches have difficulty in meeting all the individual needs of the 21st-century students. Fortunately, the rapid development of information technology and intelligent education has provided opportunity for transformation and has made BL possible as well [1].

Blended learning is a teaching approach that deliberately combines face-to-face instruction with online learning [2,3], so as to stimulate and support learning [2]. It could probably bring about improved teaching procedures and increased productivity [4].

After the arrival of MOOCs in 2012 and the emergence of flipped classrooms in 2014, China’s Ministry of Education put forward some policies to foster BL reform [5]. Since then, some instructors have begun to devote themselves to exploring the development of online teaching resources, the application of BYOD for classroom interaction, trials of flipped classrooms, etc. Nevertheless, more instructors chose to ignore such opportunity to change for the better or had always been wondering how to transform their classroom teaching.

In fact, the era of intelligent education has provided opportunity as well as challenge for the institution to transform. On the one hand, many long-standing, inherent resistances have been inhibiting its breakthrough in educational reform [6]. On the other hand, the era of intelligent education has provided institutions with better infrastructure, such as a more flexible blended learning environment, more open education resources (OER), more technological support, etc. [1].

However, very few studies have reported an integrated use of the aforementioned benefits in the intelligent education era to conduct BL reform. As a result, little is known on how to implement BL transformation within the institutional level.

Graham et al. [7] put forward a BL adoption framework for institutions, identifying strategy, structure, and support issues at three developmental stages, namely, exploration, early implementation, and mature implementation. However, there were very few empirical studies based on this framework; hence, its educational effect is barely known.

Taking all these facts into consideration, the present study designed an intervention of institutional BL reform by making a unified deployment based on Graham et al.’s [7] BL adoption framework. S university in Guangdong Province of China was invited to serve as a sample to implement the intervention systematically and explore its possible effect: whether the intervention could move the whole university from interest in BL towards a mature institutionalization of it at the end of 2021.

A research question of the study was: to what extent could S university’s unified deployment of educational reform lead to the institution’s progress in BL transformation? Specifically, this study explored the following three questions:

• How are the courses transformed and applied during the institutional educational reform period?
• What are the effects of the transformed BL courses in improving learning performance?
• To what extent have the involved instructors gained professional development?

2. Literature Review

Graham et al. [7] conducted qualitative research on six institutions of higher education in America. By refining and summarizing the features of these institutions’ BL adoption, they put forward a two-dimensional framework to assist administrators to adopt and implement BL effectively. The framework identified three broad categories (strategy, structure, and support) and three stages (awareness/exploration, adoption/early implementation, mature implementation/growth).

2.1. Blended Learning Strategy

The BL strategy is comprised of issues relating to the overall design of BL, such as purpose, advocacy, implementation, definition, and the policy surrounding it [7].

Picciano advocated blending with purpose while designing and developing BL courses and programs [8]. In terms of purpose, Graham et al. [9] summed up three general purposes for BL adoption: (1) enhanced pedagogy, (2) increased access and flexibility, and (3) improved cost effectiveness and resource use.

As for advocacy, previous studies [10,11] suggested that administrative advocates promote BL implementation by developing a shared vision for BL implementation, locating necessary funding and other resources, etc.; in addition, faculty, support staff, and even student advocates might facilitate BL implementation by boosting cooperation and enthusiasm [12,13].

When it comes to implementation, Graham et al. [7] suggested that BL implementation could be differentiated across three stages of adoption, moving from individual faculty members implementing BL to departments/colleges strategically facilitating wide-spread faculty implementation.

Many scholars have explored the definition of BL so far. S university’s definition of BL is in alignment with Boelens et al.’s definition: BL is deliberate “blending” of face-to-face and online instructional activities, with the goal of stimulating and supporting learning [2].

As for policies, Garrison and Kanuka [10] noted that a clear institutional direction and policy were vital to successfully adopting a BL initiative. According to Owston, policies that integrate goals at all levels of the academy and propose an advocate at the early stages of implementation are critical for the successful scaling up of the BL transformation [14].

2.2. Blended Learning Structure

The BL structure includes issues relating to the technological, pedagogical, and administrative frameworks facilitating the BL environment, including governance, models, scheduling, evaluation, etc. [7].

As for governance, Moskal et al. [13] proposed that institutions implementing BL should determine who might be responsible for examining and approving the development of BL courses, as well as monitoring the implementation of BL courses.

When it comes to models, Graham et al. [7] suggested that institutions that try to explore and encourage the use of BL models should be specifically targeted to their own course contexts.

Speaking of scheduling, Niemiec and Otte [15] noted that institutions should coordinate and clearly communicate the scheduling of blended courses prior to each semester. Heilporn and Lakhal’s study found that clear BL course plans could facilitate instructors to involve students in learning [16].

As is known to all, evaluation plays an important role in examining the fulfillment of the transformation purpose. Therefore, many researchers [6,10] advocated the systematic evaluation of learning outcomes and satisfaction of BL courses to ensure the success of BL implementation.

2.3. Blended Learning Support

BL support refers to the issues of how an institution facilitates the implementation and maintenance of its BL design, incorporating technical support, pedagogical support, and faculty incentives [7].

In terms of technical support, Owens [17] argued that technical support was extremely important in the process of BL course transformation as instructors need new technological skills to teach in the BL form. Meanwhile, Chiu’s research found that technical support played an important role in engaging students in blended learning by satisfying their needs [18].

As for pedagogical support, Kırkgöz found that continuous teacher training and teacher development opportunities bring about curriculum innovation [19]. In addition, Muhonen proposed that in-service training could be provided to foster a shared vision of the teaching processes [20]. Specifically, Korr et al. suggested that new pedagogical skills were required to enable instructors to conduct a blended learning design and implement instructional methods unique to blended learning [21].

When it comes to incentives, BL course transformation might create great challenges to classroom instructors, and, thus, many scholars suggested offering instructors incentives, such as funding, release time, equipment, etc. [10,22].

3. Methodology

3.1. Research Design

To ensure the successful implementation of the BL reform, S university integrated the BL adoption framework into the whole university’s educational reform model: the BASIC model (see Figure 1).

As is depicted in Figure 1, the BASIC model is composed of five elements. They are B, based on online courses; A, ability development; S, systematic implementation; I, integrated design; and C, collaborative development, respectively.

The intervention of the research was designed by following Graham et al.’s BL adoption framework [7]. Nevertheless, minor adaptions were made to meet S university’s development orientation. Specifically, the BL framework in the present study combined “advocacy, definition, and policy” as “policy”.

As a result, the BL framework was featured with three broad categories, containing 10 sub-categories. Based on such a framework, the intervention of S university’s institutional BL reform was designed to be conducted within three stages: Stage 1, exploration (2015–2016); Stage 2, early implementation (2017–2018); Stage 3, mature implementation (2019–2021).

3.2. Sample Description

The study adopted a quasi-experimental design. More than 900 courses (involving more than 14,000 students and more than 2000 instructors) within S university were taken as a sample for this study. Within the more than 900 courses, 66 courses were recruited as the experimental group that would take the initiative to conduct BL reform, whereas the other courses were considered as the control group in comparing the teaching effects.

According to the research design, all of the more than 900 courses could enjoy equal BL strategy, structure, and support within the whole university, except for incentive. Courses in the experimental group received course and project funding as well as a bonus on teaching hours, whereas courses in the controlled group would not enjoy the incentive.

3.3. Instruments

Instruments for data collection were mainly LMS, course evaluation forms, and instructor questionnaires on professional development.

The student course evaluation form was composed by S university’s Office of Academic Affairs. After entering the mature development stage, S university adopted the first-class curriculum evaluation standard (IHC: innovation, higher-order, challenge) proposed by the Ministry of Education of China (MOE) in 2018 to conduct course evaluations [23].

Based on the IHC standard, the present study composed a 7-item students’ course evaluation form (see Appendix A). Items 1–2 examined student perceptions on course innovation (I), with Items 3–5 on higher-order courses (H), and Items 6–7 on course challenge (C). At the end of every semester, students were invited to describe their perceptions of the completed courses by using a Likert scale (1–5 means strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree, respectively).

It is noteworthy that during the school closure period in the spring semester of 2020, S university collected course evaluation forms every week in order to formatively monitor and improve the teaching quality.

Instructor questionnaires were composed by team members of the present study. By referring to the instructor professional development part in the instructor questionnaires of OECD [24] and S university’s BL reform framework, the present study composed a questionnaire on instructors’ perceptions of the BL reform (see Appendix B).

The questionnaire was composed of two parts. Part One contained eight items, inviting instructors to share background information and contribution to the university’s BL reform. As it is important to perceive institution-wide BL participation status by the instructor [25], Part Two included nine items, inviting instructors to report to what extent they had participated in the BL reform and gained from the university’s BL strategy (Item 9), BL structure (Items 10–11), and BL support (Items 12–17). Instructors were invited to describe their perceptions of the effect by using a Likert scale (1–5 means very small, small, medium, big, very big, respectively).

3.4. Data Collection and Analysis

Data were mainly composed of course logs, student responses to the course evaluation forms, instructor responses on personal gains as represented by professional development, etc. Course logs were collected from the LMS and gathered from the annual report from every teaching department by the Office of Academic Affairs in S university, while the student and instructor responses were collected by distributing course evaluation forms and questionnaires.

To reveal the effect of the BL courses in improving learning performance, course evaluation results of 30 BL courses and 30 non-BL courses in the fall semester of 2019 and 2020 were compared by running an independent t-test in SPSS (23.0).

To examine the students’ satisfaction degree on the BL courses (combining online learning and webinars) during the school closure period in the spring semester of 2020, a descriptive analysis of their responses to the course evaluation forms was conducted and analyzed.

After a trial test and editing, the instructor questionnaire was distributed online to every instructor in the university. A sum of 346 instructors filled out the questionnaire. Instructors’ gains in different dimensions of instructor development were counted automatically by an online survey software.

4. Results and Discussion

4.1. Fulfillment of the Intervention Objective

S university implemented the BL reform according to the prescribed plan. Moving on from the exploration stage to the mature implementation stage, it made noteworthy achievements.

Table 1. S university’s institutional BL reform fulfillment.

Category	Stage 1: Exploration (2015–2016)	Stage 2: Early Implementation (2017–2018)	Stage 3: Mature Implementation (2019–2021)
Strategy
Purpose	Less F2F 1 time	Ss’ abilities Ts’ development	Ss’ abilities Ts’ p development
Implementation	<5% of courses involved	18% of courses involved	59% of courses involved 20–50% online
Policy	Institutional policy (V1 2)	Institutional policy (V2)	Institutional BL policy (V3)
Structure
Governance	LMS 3 school inspection	LMS school inspection	LMS school inspection Video surveillance Ss survey
Models	Standard 151 (V1)	Standard 151 (V2)	Standard 151 (V3)
Scheduling	OL 4 curriculum schedule	OL curriculum schedule BL curriculum schedule	BL curriculum schedule
Evaluation	Small-scale Ss survey	Large-scale Ss survey Formative evaluation	Large-scale Ss survey Formative evaluation Summative evaluation
Support
Technical	LMS	LMS BL Community of Practice	LMS BL Community of Practice
Pedagogical	6 BL lectures 5 BL workshops 22 BL salons	8 BL lectures 6 BL workshops 25 BL salons Fund/arrange BL trainings	One-to-one expert guidance 4 BL lectures Fund BL trainings
Incentives	Fund 53 BL courses Fund provincial projects Teaching hrs counted as double	Fund 13 BL courses Fund provincial projects Teaching hrs counted as double	Fund provincial projects Teaching hrs counted as double Teaching hrs of credited BL courses counted as double

¹ “F2F” is short for “face to face”; ² ”V” is short for “version”; ³ “LMS” is short for “learning management system”; ⁴ “OL” is short for “online learning”.

sums up S university’s institutional BL reform fulfillment from 2015 to 2021.

4.1.1. Achievement on Blended Learning Strategy

As is described in Table 1, S university basically fulfilled its goal in the aspect of BL strategy.

Beginning with purpose, the BL transformation initially aimed at reducing the F2F time so as to save teaching faculty’s time and energy commuting to the sub-campus. Moving on to Stages 2 and 3, instructors of the BL courses shifted to focus on improving students’ higher-order thinking abilities and independent learning ability as well as seeking for instructors’ professional development.

Furthermore, it is noteworthy that in terms of implementation, Stage 1 only involved less than 5% of the courses in exploring BL implementation and gradually increased to 59% at Stage 3, combining 20–50% of online learning time with 50–80% of face-to-face meeting time. This result is in alignment with Müller and Mildenberger‘s findings that higher education institutions are trying to provide more flexibility and individualization [26].

When it comes to policy, S university planned to put forward a tentative version of institutional BL policy at Stage 1 and to keep revising it until it was more comprehensive at Stage 3.

4.1.2. Achievement on Blended Learning Structure

As is described in Table 1, S university made several achievements in terms of the BL structure.

Firstly, S university appointed an LMS admin to monitor all courses and continued to use its long-established school inspection to ensure the quality of the BL courses. It is noteworthy that video surveillance of the F2F sections and student surveys were added as supplements for course governance at Stage 3.

Secondly, in the sub-category of models, S university put forward an Instruction Guide for BL: 151 (see Appendix C), which had gone through three rounds of revision until it finally met the reform need of the institution.

Thirdly, S university provided a flexible scheduling system for BL courses, including exclusively online and BL learning.

Last but not least, the evaluation at Stage 1 relied merely on a small-scale student survey and gradually evolved to include a large-scale student survey and a formative evaluation of courses (2.2 million–2.5 million records/semester) as well as a summative evaluation of courses (0.1 million–0.125 million records/semester).

4.1.3. Achievement on Blended Learning Support

As is described in Table 1, BL support played a very crucial role in S university’s BL reform.

Technically, S university began with developing a Moodle platform that provided instructors and students with internal accounts to access. With the progress of the BL reform, S university noticed the demand to exchange courses with other universities. Therefore, it purchased some nationwide LMS services, such as iCourse (https://www.icourse163.org/, accessed on 1 September 2016), xuetang (https://www.xuetangx.com/, accessed on 1 September 2016), etc. Meanwhile, the university set up a BL Community of Practice for the teaching faculty to share experiences and to seek support whenever they came across technical problems.

Pedagogically, S university arranged a series of BL lectures, workshops, salons, trainings, etc. Moving on to Stage 2, the university began to fund/arrange BL trainings; apart from this, one-to-one expert guidance was added to pedagogical support at Stage 3.

As for incentives, S university spent RMB 10.065 million in funding BL courses and RMB 5.8 million in funding BL provincial projects. What is more, teaching hours of the BL courses were counted as double as a bonus at Stages 1 and 2. Moving into Stage 3, such a bonus was removed. Instead, the provincial/national credited BL courses could receive such a bonus as a reward.

4.2. Transformation of Institutional Courses

4.2.1. Course Transformation

Since 2015, the university has been trying to develop online courses and implement blended learning. These online courses were mainly released and run on the university’s Moodle platform. Starting from the mature implementation stage, a total of 58 high-quality courses were released on national MOOC platforms and open to the whole country for course selection. This section discusses how S university conducted BL based on SPOCs on Moodle and MOOCs on a national platform: iCourse, Zhihuishu, Xuetang, Xueyin, etc. (see

Table 2. Number of S university’s BL courses based on SPOC/MOOC.

LMS	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021
Moodle	31	19	72	39	41	511	400
iCourse	0	0	0	0	5	8	19
Zhihuishu	0	0	0	1	12	15	22
Xuetang	0	0	0	1	3	6	9
Xueyin	0	0	0	1	1	3	8
Total	31	19	72	42	62	543	458

and

Table 3. Enrollment of S university’s BL courses based on SPOC/MOOC.

LMS	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021
Moodle	20,415	8596	43,712	6141	20,003	117,211	79,555
iCourse	0	0	0	0	37,351	62,966	117,020
Zhihuishu	0	0	0	110	46,551	63,684	59,598
Xuetang	0	0	0	8727	7300	23,898	3524
Xueyin	0	0	0	277	3396	5800	6635
Total	20,415	8596	43,712	15,255	114,601	273,559	266,332

).

As is indicated in Table 2 and Table 3, the BL courses of S university showed a trend of steady development year by year from 2015 to 2021, with the number of beneficiary students increasing at a great speed and expanding to the whole country.

During the school closure period as a result of COVID-19 in early 2020, S university converted all of its existing courses to BL courses, combining online learning and webinars. As is suggested in Table 2, in the year 2020, 511 courses were conducted on Moodle in the form of SPOC; meanwhile, 32 courses were run on national MOOC platforms. In fact, it was the mature teaching reform mode of the institute that enabled its teaching emergency response ability to withstand the test of the epidemic.

In responding to the COVID-19 crisis, the instructors who had been reluctant to join the reform had their courses transformed into BL courses. Accordingly, a total of 543 courses carried out BL in 2020, and 458 courses (84.35%) maintained the trend in 2021. Moreover, the number of courses converted from SPOC to MOOC increased from 32 in 2020 to 59 in 2021 (an increase of nearly two times), with a total of 446,837 students enrolled in the courses nationwide (see Table 3). Thus far, S university’s BL reform has influenced online and blended teaching within the whole country on a larger scale.

Within the 7 years, many of the BL courses were developed gradually and have been improved in quantity and quality in the process of application. Most BL courses enjoy an annual update rate of more than 10%, gradually being transformed from traditional courses to BL courses.

Figure 2 presents the iteration of the teaching videos and BL activities of the top 10 active courses: (1) Parasitology, (2) Health Assessment, (3) Pharmaceutical Regulation, (4) Medical Cytobiology, (5) Internet + College English, (6) Meridians & Pointology, (7) Massage Mechanolatry, (8) Introduction to Socialist Theory with Chinese Characteristics, (9) Acupuncture and Moxibustion, and (10) Traditional Chinese Medicine (Note: S university is a medical university.).

Figure 2 depicts the development of the most active courses in S university, revealing how the courses experienced a process of accumulation from a new-built course with very few videos and BL activities to mature BL courses. According to a recent survey within the whole university, this trend applied to other BL courses in S university as well.

This result endorses Porter et al.’s recommendation that institutions are supposed to develop an adequate infrastructure and support to facilitate the transformation of face-to-face courses to BL experiences [27].

4.2.2. Course Application

Starting in 2015, the administration office provided a variety of convenience for BL courses, such as specifically scheduling online learning hours according to instructors’ designs and arrangements. Courses in S university transformed gradually based on two principles: firstly, they followed the routine of “occasional → frequent → normalized” in terms of implementation frequency; secondly, the followed the routine of “partial → majority → whole” in terms of course transformation. Such course application policy worked quite well in the past 7 years. Actual implementation details are shown in

Table 4. Teaching hours of BL course in S university.

	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	Total
Online 1	1168	2996	5756	6170	8783	23,361	22,913	71,147
Total 2	115,034	115,604	115,967	122,733	136,844	149,577	148,159	903,918
OL/Total	1.02%	2.59%	4.96%	5.03%	6.42%	15.62%	15.47%	7.87%

¹ This table only counts the schedule recorded in the administration office. In fact, some BL courses arrange online learning using extra schooling time, which was not recorded here. ² Total schooling hours include hours of online learning, F2F of BL, PBL, lecture, hands-on workshop, experiment, discussion, PE, exam, internship, social practice, etc.

.

As is shown in Table 4, the online class hours showed a rapid growth trend due to the fact that an increasing number of courses participated in the BL education reform year by year.

In fact, domestic experts and peers have widely recognized the teaching concept, design, and effect of these BL courses, represented by the fact that a total of 17 BL/online courses of S university have won provincial first-class course certification (ranking first among universities in Guangdong Province), and 14 courses have won national first-class course certification (ranking first among independent medical universities in China) since 2019.

Apart from BL courses’ recognition, S university’s systematic BL reform practice and overall teaching practice has won the second and grand prizes of Teaching Achievement Award in Guangdong Province in 2021.

This result is in correspondence with Kırkgöz’s finding that teacher development opportunities could bring about curriculum innovation [19].

4.3. Improvement of Students’ Learning Performance

4.3.1. Effect in Improving Learning Performance

Due to the space limit, the evaluation results of 30 BL courses and 30 non-BL courses were randomly selected for comparison. Results are shown in

Table 5. Course evaluation of S University (n = 60).

Categories	Fall Semester of 2019			Fall Semester of 2020
	BL (M)	Non-BL (M)	Sig.	BL (M)	Non-BL (M)	Sig.
Innovation	4.618	4.611	0.828	4.682	4.612	0.002 *
Higher-order	4.6095	4.597	0.694	4.6495	4.617	0.223 *
Challenge	4.577	4.543	0.321 *	4.697	4.6425	0.045 *
Total	4.6025	4.5855	0.593	4.6725	4.623	0.032 *

.

As is indicated in Table 5, according to the survey results in the fall semester of 2019, the total mean score of “innovation, higher-order, challenge” for the BL courses in 2019 were 0.017 points higher than that of the non-BL courses, without a significant difference (p = 0.593 > 0.05). However, the total mean score of the BL courses in 2020 was 0.0495 points higher than that of the non-BL courses, showing a significant difference (p = 0.032 < 0.05). Meanwhile, the “innovation” of the BL courses outweighed that of the non-BL courses with a significant difference (p = 0.002 < 0.05). The “challenge” of the BL courses outweighed that of the non-BL courses with a significant difference (p = 0.045 < 0.05) as well. It can be inferred that the students had a positive perception of the BL courses in developing their ability.

The result of this part is in alignment with previous research findings that BL is effective in improving learning performance [28,29,30] or at least enjoys equivalent learning outcomes with conventional classroom learning [26].

4.3.2. Students’ Satisfaction Rate of the BL Courses during School Closure Period

On average, more than 20,000 students responded to the course evaluation form per week during the school closure period in the spring semester of 2020. Descriptive analysis results are depicted in Figure 3.

As is seen in Figure 3, more than 95% of the students were able to finish their study tasks on time every week and the student satisfaction rate increased steadily from 86.83% in Week 1 to 93.03% in Week 10.

This result agrees with previous research findings that students hold positive attitudes and express great satisfaction towards BL [31,32]. Furthermore, this result supports Owston et al.’s claim that students may develop a greater sense of satisfaction with the BL course experience [33].

4.4. Development of Instructors’ Professional Skills

4.4.1. Instructors’ BL Projects and Publications

Since 2015, instructors in S university have been devoting themselves to BL reform and research. As a reward, some of them have been approved for school-level/provincial BL education reform projects successively (see

Table 6. S University’s BL projects.

	Year	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021
Level
School		31	25	18	9	18	26	23
Provincial		1	3	3	2	2	7	14

).

As is seen in Table 6, the number of school-level BL projects has been almost steady along the 7 years, except for a decline in 2018. Meanwhile, the number of the provincial BL projects was very small at the awareness/exploration and adoption/early implementation stages; however, the number increased rapidly at the mature/growth stage.

As for publications, S university has published 56 journal papers on BL at home and abroad, ranking second among colleges and universities in Guangdong Province, third among medical universities in China, and 20th among colleges and universities in China (see

Table 7. S university’s publication of journal papers on BL.

Publication	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	Total
National	1	1	10	10	8	10	13	53
International				1	1		1	3

).

4.4.2. Instructors’ Perception on Professional Development

Questionnaire results indicated that 7.8% (n = 27) of the 346 instructors started BL in 2015, with a steady increase from 2016 to 2018. Entering Stage 3 in 2019, there was a leap in the number of instructors (n = 51) who newly converted their courses to be BL courses. The school closure period due to COVID-19 in the spring semester of 2020 led to a steep rise of more instructors beginning to conduct BL courses (n = 119). The year 2021 welcomed another 37 instructors to the BL reform. Altogether, 82.66% (n = 286) of the instructors have been conducting BL courses, whereas 17.34% (n = 60) of the interviewed instructors have not yet tried out a BL course (see Figure 4).

According to the results in the second part of the questionnaire, most instructors actively involved themselves in the BL reform and have benefited greatly from it in terms of professional development (see

Table 8. Instructors’ involvement and gains in S university’s BL reform (n = 346).

Category	Indicator	Involvement		Perception on Gains (M)
		No. of Ts	Percentage
Strategy	The institutional BL policy	285	82.37%	3.44
Structure	Feedback from school inspection and/or peers	249	71.97%	3.40
	Feedback from students	288	83.24%	3.55
Support	LMS for BL course implementation	264	76.30%	3.55
	The institutional BL community of practice (the Wechat Group)	197	56.94%	3.32
	The BL lectures, workshops, and salons	237	68.50%	3.60
	BL course transformation with institutional funding	66	19.08%	3.64
	BL course transformation without institutional funding	224	64.74%	3.21
	Provincial BL reform projects and/or provincial award in teaching competitions	92	26.59%	3.64

).

Table 8 indicates that 82.37% of the instructors read the institutional BL policy and reached a consensus on the goal of the institutional BL reform in terms of strategy.

As for structure, most instructors (71.97%, 83.24%) reported to have received feedback from a school inspection and/or peers and students on their BL course implementation and had benefited from it (M = 3.40, 3.55, respectively).

When it comes to support, technically, 76.30% of the instructors benefited from the LMS provided by the university and utilized them for BL course implementation (M = 3.55). Meanwhile, 56.94% of the instructors joined the institutional BL community of practice and received immediate technical support from the support team and peers (M = 3.32). Pedagogically, 68.50% of them benefited from the BL lectures, workshops, and salons arranged/funded by S university (M = 3.60). As for incentives, 19.08% of the instructors enjoyed the institutional funding on the BL course transformation and gained professional development (M = 3.64). It is noteworthy that the number of these instructors equaled the number of instructors funded during the year of 2015–2016. In contrast, 64.74% of the instructors conducted BL course transformation without institutional funding and benefited relatively less than those funded and who had started with the course transformation at Stage 1 (M = 3.21). Apart from this, 26.59% of the questionnaire participants benefited from the funded provincial BL reform projects and/or won a provincial award in teaching competitions (M = 3.64).

In summary, most of the instructors participated actively in the university’s BL reform and benefited from it in terms of professional development. This finding supports Porter and Graham’s conclusion that a clear purpose, necessary infrastructure, and strong support may be significantly influential for innovative faculty and early adopters [34].

5. Conclusions and Implications

Making use of the opportunities in the era of intelligent education, the present study designed an intervention of institutional BL reform by making a unified deployment based on Graham et al.’s BL adoption framework and investigating its effect. Results indicated that S university systematically conducted the BL transformation and gradually reached the mature implementation stage. This study contributes to the literature by reporting a best practice of BL institutional adoption.

BL is “student-centered, quality-focused, ability-oriented”; hence, it is probably one of the teaching approaches that is worth popularizing. Guided by Graham et al.’s framework [7], S university’s educational reform enabled the university to achieve expected results in response to Kim et al.’s appeal for more efforts in regard to educational reform to render a significant benefit for the institution, its students, and its instructors [35]. It is suggested that institutions make good use of the opportunity in the era of intelligent education to conduct a unified deployment of educational reform and, in turn, add their contribution to the development of intelligent education.

Based on the research results and findings, three implications, from the perspectives of strategy, structure, and support, could be drawn for institutional BL reform:

Firstly, a top-down systematic deployment is suggested to promote the realization of BL transformation. Thanks to the peer effect, in which “the average behavior of a group influences the behavior of individual group members” [36], an increasing number of instructors joined in the BL Community of Practice in S university. They worked together to explore the BL design issues such as incorporating flexibility, stimulating interaction, facilitating students’ learning processes, fostering an effective learning climate, etc., as pointed out as BL design challenges by Boelens et al. [2].

Secondly, a concise, clear BL framework and standards could empower instructors to start BL course transformation quickly. One of the prerequisites of successful institutional reform is a lower threshold, which encourages instructors to get started and dig deeper gradually, “without adding unnecessary complications and workloads for the instructor” [35].

Finally, a targeted pedagogical, immediate technical, and considerable financial support could work together to ensure sustainable BL reform. Looking back, S university conducted a series of lectures, workshops, and salons within the BL community of practices along the three development stages; in addition, it invested sufficient finance in allocating bonuses for BL teaching hours, providing BL project funding, etc.