Over the past year or so, I’ve been working with a consortium of four districts in New Mexico on a project to foster online and blended learning. It’s been a great experience that has benefited teachers and students and left me more convinced than ever of the power of technology to help differentiate instruction.

Here’s a short video that summarizes our work.

On Tues., Oct. 11, 5pm EDT (2pm PDT), we’ll be hosting a one-hour webinar to talk about online and blended learning. Anyone is welcome to attend. (Here is the sign-in link.)

Credit: Giulia Forsythe

Webinar  – Online Learning: What works and what doesn’t?

This webinar will include several online course facilitator experts and will give participants a chance to ask questions about what works best in online and blended learning.

This webinar will feature:

• Matt Renfroe works as an Instructional Design Manager for Florida Virtual School, the nation’s largest public virtual school.  In existence for 15 years, FLVS served over 200,000 half-credit enrollments last year.
• DeLaina Tonks is the Director of the award-winning Open High School of Utah. Open High School gathers existing Open Educational Resources, then augments with teacher-created materials aligned to state standards for their entire curriculum, then publicly releases it under a Creative Commons license.
• Jason Neiffer is the Curriculum Director of  Montana Digital Academy, where he has led 75 teachers in developing, adapting and delivering over 50 courses to nearly 5500 enrollments from over 175 schools across Big Sky Country.

We’ve been doing a lot of work here lately in online and blended learning, building courses and helping teachers think about how to use online learning as a tool to help differentiate instruction.

Blended learning is the way that many K-12 schools are getting into this area. Blended learning, of course, is when part of the instruction is face-to-face and part is online.

That spans a big continuum though, and I’ve found that while some teachers offer their students great flexibility in the online portion of their class, others are more traditional. In fact, some ideas of “blended” learning are not obviously different from regular technology integration. As an example, I would not consider whole class activities with a projector and a learning management system like Moodle to be “blended.” Yes, they may be very effective and great uses of technology, but they do not allow the students the benefits of learning anywhere, anytime, and in any way they like. That is the key to blended learning.

So to stretch the thinking of teachers who are new to blended learning, I researched how the experts define blended learning. Here is a compilation of the results.

The percentages of instruction that is done online is interesting, but more intriguing is the description of learning that is student-centered, active, and personalized. To me, that is what online and blended learning is all about.

Yesterday, I had an energetic discussion on FB with some friends prompted by this:

I know many gifted tchrs + admins (some right here on FB) who are in environments that do not represent an optimal model of learning + who are looking for something better. Couldn’t we all get together + start a new, better school? (Yes, I know about charter schools but there are also opportunities in public ed.) Am I naive or do we lack imagination or willpower or something else?

Part of the dialogue that ensued had to do with what authority such a new school might be founded under: public school, charter school, private school, online school, hybrid, or something else.

Here are things I think are incompatible with sound public education: corporations driven by quarterly profits, publicly-elected leadership boards, and unions and/or tenure. But I am a big believer in and supporter of public education.

I’ve written before about the opportunities for reform that I think online and blended learning present to public education. People in the know seem to think that public schools are not in the position to seize this opportunity. If you haven’t seen it, Pearson and others seem to be moving quickly to capitalize.

If there is a market for this for big publishers, there is surely a niche for small groups focused on higher quality.

One big question I have is how the two roles of facilitating learning and babysitting will be divided up in the new blended world. Much has been written about the role of schools as “holding tanks.” Even if consensus could be gained that babysitting should not be schools’ role, few parents have the ability or will to supervise their children all day while they attend online school.

So if we could devise a better school online, who is in a good position to deal with the “babysitting” problem? This is especially challenging in a decentralized environment with many isolated rural families. Some possible answers: corporate day care centers (especially ones that already have infrastructure in place…Sylvan, etc.), community organizations, co-ops of parents, existing public schools. Other than post offices, it is difficult to think of organizations with physical infrastructures that outstrip public schools.

I agree with my friend Sue who has said that this situation calls for some real out of the box thinking. What are your out of the box ideas?

[And for regular readers who might wonder what this has to do with mobile technology, this seems to me to be a given in any sort of curriculum-driven reform effort, as well as for online/blended learning.]

There is a lot of dissatisfaction about the current state of public education in America and as a result,  calls for reform. Many are unhappy with the amount and nature of testing and the general direction of industrial era curricula. Others have concerns about teacher effectiveness. Nearly everyone agrees that our kids are getting short-changed.

But what is being done about it? The feds seem to be steamrolling ahead with the same old same old. States are in crisis. Districts are busy covering their proverbial asses. Some of the best teachers are leaving education. Proponents of ed reform seem to be mostly engaged in hand wringing and name calling.

Charter schools and other fringe initiatives seem to have little chance to make a difference for the huge number of students moving through the K-12 system.

One opportunity for real reform is in online learning. There is broad consensus that online learning is going to be a dominant part of the educational experience for many students in the future.  Most states have significant online learning programs. Online learning helps address teacher shortages, which are projected to worsen in the next few years. Blended learning is being written into everyone’s plans. Schools are finding more flexible options necessary, and students are demanding it.

But online learning can take many appearances. It can be a transformative learning environment with an emphasis on deeper learning, collaboration, and 21st century thinking skills. Or it can be the same industrial model of content cramming coverage, dull textbooks, and (online) lecturing heads.

These choices are being made right now as online course structure is being designed.

Equally important are the decisions about what role public K-12 schools are going to have in online education. Will they embrace the challenge to develop and facilitate  enriching courses or will they cede that role to commercial providers in the way that has been done with textbooks?

To choose the latter path will mean lots of money being directed toward traditional, proprietary content that supports the status quo.

To choose the former will require plenty of creativity, energy, professional development, support, and more. But it just could be the path out of the current morass we’re in.