 Especially in blended learning sort of by association as a total cop-out that it was the professors who were either in institutions or the institutions were pushing them to do education on the cheap and were sort of forcing them into a mode of education that wasn't appropriate or it was teachers who really didn't want to teach anymore and wanted to teach from the beach and that these were just easy ways to teach and not the most effective methods. I had to start experimenting with online learning abroad because I was working with an outreach group in Istanbul, Turkey and we were trying to educate the public there about seismic risk, all of the earthquakes that they were exposed to and what they could particularly do to keep themselves safe and we were this little group of people. We had all these volunteer trainers, they were super excited, they had these flipboards, occasionally they had the laptop and we would send them out to their communities and they would do these community education sessions about earthquake risk and preparedness and it worked wonderfully. We were very excited but it was this mega city of ten million people and even with fifty trainers we were barely, barely addressing the need so the Ministry of Education started working with us and said let's make this country wide, let's integrate it into the educational system and reach everybody or at least reach all the children and we thought it was great, we were excited, we said yes and then we went good god how are we going to pull this one off, we can't actually send flipboards out and train every teacher in the country of seventy five million people. So we went towards an online approach and immediately realized we had no idea what we were doing that our initial sort of oh we'll just take the training that we do face-to-face and we'll just make a slideshow out of it and that'll be good we suddenly realized that wasn't going to work because there was no feedback to know what people were learning, there was no way for people to really engage with the material and we were just going to be incredibly boring if we did it that way. So we quickly learned as much as we could about online learning and read as much as we could, started talking across three or four continents and started developing online material that had lots of interaction to it, lots of quizzing to it, lots of real-life examples to it and then gave it to the Ministry of Education and worked with them to disseminate it and the first year I mean I had thought okay this is a different way of doing this is that fine whatever the numbers came back and it was 80,000 teachers had taken the initial the initial mini course on preparedness and 40,000 had taken all 11 mini courses and we're then disseminating it in 40,000 classrooms and I went whoa this is powerful this is powerful in an environment where you can't reach everyone because you can't do a face-to-face conversation. So I put that aside as okay when you're doing public education think about online learning as a tool I didn't immediately run back to my university and think I should be putting this to practice in my classes myself. Then years teaching this human ecology and sustainability course it's all about ourselves in our environment how we interact with each other and with material resources very much about creating community of learning very much about being face-to-face and talking to each other and these long deep conversations that we had in class thought it worked really well and I wasn't going to change it but during the economic recession we got to the point where the wait list for the class was longer than the size of the class and I realized I really need to open this up this small 30-student discussion class and I really need to make it a 70-student class just to fulfill the need and so my immediate thought was okay well we did sort of online when we needed to go big and broad in Turkey maybe I'll bring in some of that material there and I started experimenting with a little bit of blending in that very large classroom approach to a small discussion class some success some failures but more than anything it gave me you know the impetus to let's start playing back and forth with these two modes of learning and find a good balance for them.