Unleashing the creative potential of faculty to create blended learning

Bottom-up managed change processes offer the advantage to use the creative power of faculty to design and implement blended learning programs. This article proposes four factors as crucial elements for a successful bottom-up change process: the macro and micro contexts, the project leader and the project members. Interviews were conducted with 5 administrators, one student council member and 13 faculty members involved in a large-scale bottom-up change process. The interviews reveal that, with the necessary elements in place, a bottom-up change process leads to three important outcomes: firstly, the development of blended learning programs which match the needs of faculty and learner, secondly, incentives for new task forces to solve institutional bottlenecks which only faculty could have discovered and thirdly, new knowledge for the institutes. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.