 The approach, especially the online course where I brought in several meetings where we did face-to-face or online meetings, to have surprising benefits for the students. The most noticeable benefit for the students is that they got to hear from everyone in the classroom. In a traditional classroom discussion, there's usually the people, usually your front-row sitter, done the reading, are comfortable speaking in a classroom setting, and they tend to dominate the conversation. In the blended environment, we started out with online discussions. The students had to do their readings, take the quiz to show that they've done the readings, and then they could enter the discussion. So everybody was coming to the discussion with the background reading done, something you cannot assume in a traditional classroom. And then everybody was required to join the discussion. And it meant that we heard from everybody, and the people who were quiet, who do better formulating their thoughts and rethinking it and then finalizing their thoughts had time to do that in an online environment. And the depth of conversation was astounding. It was just much, much higher than anything in a traditional classroom. And I loved it. It was energizing to have all of the perspectives coming in, and that depth. And the other thing that the online and blended environment allowed me to do was have a wider range of students participating in my class. My traditional classroom is campus-based, so it's campus students participating. My online blended class had a third of the students who were from our Peninsula program over on the Olympic Peninsula. And they're place-based students. Many of them are older students. Many of them are working in natural resource management, tribal resource management. And so it had real workplace experience and a rural experience that contrasted greatly from sort of the suburban experience of most of my campus-based students. And so that conversation was different because the perspectives were so much greater. It was very, very interesting to have those students involved. After having these in-depth online conversations with all of these diverse perspectives, I had three or four times where the students met face-to-face or in that online meeting environment. And that first time we met, one of the students commented, I mean literally just walked into the room and said, I feel like I know all of you better than I've ever known anyone else in a classroom. I feel like you're already all my friends and I've never seen your face before. And we were immediately able to have a much more in-depth face-to-face conversation because those relationships had already developed online, which is really neat to see. I recorded all of my lectures as mini video lectures that I gave them links for. And they'd say, you know, we were at the beach or I was on the bus and I would listen to you and then when you got to me too much, I would just hit pause or I would rewind you and I'd listen to you again. And so they found that incredibly flexible. I also found it flexible to be able to think through my lecture and deliver it in my own pace, be able to modify it if I wanted to after the fact, get it down to exactly what I wanted to say, which then freed up all kinds of time in the classroom or in the discussion boards for them to do student directed and peer-to-peer learning. So these blended environments, I think, prepare students for the type of work environments they may be facing in the future. I know that for me, a lot of my research now is global and it's in a blended environment where I'll meet people face-to-face some of the time, but a lot of time we'll be working online either synchronously or asynchronously. And working in teams in that way is a skill that we need to be helping students learn and experiment with on campus so that they're better prepared for that possibility in their professional lives. With a blended environment, it also allows me to almost slow the teaching down a bit so that I have time to really see what my students are thinking and then respond in a much more thoughtful and thought-provoking way. I guess give us a thought, you know, read what the students are saying on a discussion, go away for five or six hours really, sort of let it percolate a little bit, and then come back with a much more in-depth and appropriate response for them to help them, you know, push their learning even further. I felt like I was a better teacher when I could use a wider range of tools. Well, there's something very rewarding about doing something, the same thing you've been doing just in a new way. It makes you rethink the material, makes you re-engage with the material again, and then it allows you to sort of throw all the balls up in the air and go, okay, what the hell do I really need here? And let's tackle this slightly differently. This is just exciting and it keeps me as a teacher engaged in their learning process.