# Institutional Adoption and Implementation of Blended Learning in the Era of Intelligent Education
## 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 21 st-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, theera 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.  
[PERSON] 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 [PERSON] 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:  
1. How are the courses transformed and applied during the institutional educational reform period?
2. What are the effects of the transformed BL courses in improving learning performance?
3. To what extent have the involved instructors gained professional development?