Blended Learning – A Path towards Modernizing Higher Economic Education?

The recent history of education emphasizes that the new generations seem to be increasingly more connected to modern means of communication and increasingly less willing to adopt classical styles of learning. Many of those concerned about the future of education in general and the higher education in particular are beginning to wonder whether the whole system should be reconfigured. In this context, with the amid criticism published regarding online learning, in the early 2000s started to be used in universities and in specialized journals the concept of blended learning. Thus, until 2004, for the US, it appears that 45.9% of universities already had developed offers including blended-learning courses (Allen, Seaman and Garrett, 2007). Starting from the reality of the 2000s and the increased interest of young people to use new techniques and technologies, some optimists predicted that blended-learning will become the "new traditional model" (Ross and Gage, 2006) or the so-called "new normality" (Norberg et al., 2011). However, among the scientists there are still many controversies concerning the long-term effects of introducing blended-learning in educational institutions. Based on these considerations, this paper aims to present the pros and cons of introducing specific elements of blended-learning in higher economic education in Romania.