Blended

Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools

Michael B. Horn, Heather Staker

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118955161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Navigate the transition to blended learning with this practical field guide

Blended is the practical field guide for implementing blended learning techniques in K-12 classrooms. A follow-up to the bestseller Disrupting Class by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael Horn, and Curtis Johnson, this hands-on guide expands upon the blended learning ideas presented in that book to provide practical implementation guidance for educators seeking to incorporate online learning with traditional classroom time. Readers will find a step-by-step framework upon which to build a more student-centered system, along with essential advice that provides the expertise necessary to build the next generation of K-12 learning environments. Leaders, teachers, and other stakeholders will gain valuable insight into the process of using online learning to the greatest benefit of students, while avoiding missteps and potential pitfalls.

If online learning has not already rocked your local school, it will soon. Blended learning is one of the hottest trends in education right now, and educators are clamoring for "how-to" guidance. Blended answers the call by providing detailed information about the strategy, design, and implementation of a successful blended learning program.

• Discover a useful framework for implementing blended learning
• Unlock the benefits and mitigate the risks of online learning
• Find answers to the most commonly asked questions surrounding blended learning
• Create a more student-centered system that functions as a positive force across grade levels

Educators who loved the ideas presented in Disrupting Class now have a field guide to making it work in a real-world school, with expert advice for making the transition smoother for students, parents, and teachers alike. For educational leaders seeking more student-centered schools, Blended provides the definitive roadmap.

Part 1

Understanding

Chapter 1
What Is Blended Learning?

You can't go more than a few steps in education circles these days without hearing about blended learning. It's at the top of the list of trending topics related to changing education. Thanks in part to Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy—which serves more than ten million students per month in at least two hundred countries with its massive library of instructional videos and interactive exercises—the idea of blended learning is becoming commonplace.¹ But before the Khan Academy, and even before the term “blended learning” emerged, millions of students were experiencing the blend of online learning into their schools. Scholastic's READ 180 reading intervention program, which initially loaded on school computers through CD-ROMs and later migrated online, has been in classrooms since 1998, and today serves roughly 1.3 million students in over forty thousand classrooms.² Although the exact extent of blended learning at the K–12 level in America is unknown, experts at the Evergreen Education Group estimate that more than 75 percent of districts offer some online or blended options.³

But any fair look at education technology in U.S. K–12 schools must acknowledge that the nation has spent over $100 billion on computers in the past few decades with very little to show for it in the way of results.⁴ So why all the hype about blended learning? What makes it any different from the long history of computers and technology in schools?

Online Learning's Upward March

Blended learning has its roots in online learning. Like all disruptive innovations—from Amazon.com to TurboTax—online learning is improving steadily and predictably, as it seeks to serve more demanding users in tougher situations.

This pattern of disruptive innovations is critical to understanding what's ahead for online learning. When it emerged, online learning predictably had the reputation of being a low-end, second-string alternative to the traditional face-to-face classroom. Among the forty thousand or so K–12 students who were taking at least one online course in 2000, most used online coursework as a last-ditch effort to recover credits in time for graduation, avoid dropping out of school, or study independently in a homeschool or other distance-learning setting.⁵ Online learning had little appeal for mainstream students.

But true to the pattern of disruptive innovations, online learning has marched steadily upward to reach a broader range of students and has even begun to replace traditional instruction in certain instances. In some schools, online foreign language courses were the first a viable substitute for attending a traditional face-to-face class. High Tech High, a charter school network based in San Diego, California, began using Rosetta Stone's foreign language program, for example, because of the software's reputation for helping students master languages faster than a lecture-style classroom can. “Rosetta Stone has spent millions in research and development, and it has a very clever way of interacting with its users,” said Larry Rosenstock, CEO of High Tech High. He believes students can learn more in a year with Rosetta Stone than with even the best face-to-face teachers.⁶

One of the most significant ways that online learning improved was by leaning more heavily on in-person, brick-and-mortar experiences to provide support and scaffolding for students learning online. In the early days, online programs were largely indifferent to where students learned. The stand-alone, self-contained courses worked whether students were learning from home, a computer lab, or the library. Physical location simply didn't matter, provided that the learner had a good enough internet connection and a willing appetite for a fully virtual experience.

Those who provided the online courses soon discovered, however, that there is a limit to the number of students who can work without the explicit supervision and face-to-face mentoring of an adult. The same analysis in Disrupting Class that shows that 50 percent of all high school classes will be delivered online in some form by 2019 also reveals that homeschooling and full-time virtual schooling will not substitute for brick-and-mortar schooling, as their rapid growth flattens out at just under 10 percent of the U.S. K–12 student population.⁷ That suggests that over 90 percent of students will continue to depend on adult supervision at brick-and-mortar schools.

This 90-percent estimate rings true. Most children need a safe place to be during the day outside of the home while their parents are busy. In fact, one of the main functions that schools perform is purely custodial—to watch over children and keep them safe. Most students also want a physical place to hang out together and have fun, as well as a place to receive help from their teachers, two other important aspects that can be separated from content delivery.

Eyeing the opportunity to harness the virtues of online learning for this 90 percent, innovative school leaders and teachers sought ways to weave online learning into the brick-and-mortar school experience. That effort produced the term “blended learning,” which entered the K–12 education lexicon roughly at the turn of the twenty-first century. Because most parents and students need school to be more than purely virtual, the blend of online learning and K–12 campuses represents a major breakthrough in the integration of online learning into the mainstream.⁸

Outside of education, other purely virtual technologies have followed the same trail of adding a brick-and-mortar element to serve more people. For example, one way that some online retailers are gaining ground is by opening brick-and-mortar stores whose primary purpose is to serve as a showroom—a space where potential customers can test or try on inventory that was previously viewable only online—and then purchase from the online store. Bonobos, a men's apparel store that was once dogmatic about selling only online, opened six brick-and-mortar stores in 2012. The stores carry limited inventory and employ only a few salespeople. The retail “un-stores” are an example of disruption's upward march; after gaining a foothold by launching as a simple online solution, companies and organizations on a disruptive path pursue sustaining innovations—such as retail showrooms—to allow them to serve more demanding customers.⁹

What Blended Learning Is—and Isn't

Blended learning is critically different from—but easily confused with—the much broader trend of equipping classrooms with devices and software. The common use of “blended learning” in education circles and the media suffers from a Goldilocks problem. People use the term either too broadly, to refer to all education technology (“edtech”) crammed into a classroom, or too narrowly, to point to only the types of blended learning that they like best.

Beginning in 2010 we interviewed the educators behind over 150 blended-learning programs to arrive at a “just right” middle-ground definition that is broad enough to allow for variation but narrow enough to differentiate it from the bottomless category of the use of edtech in schools. It has three parts.

In Part through Online Learning

First, blended learning is any formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online learning, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace.

The reference to a “formal education program” is important because it excludes instances when a student plays an educational Xbox game at home or browses a learning app in the grocery store line, independent of her formal school program. More critical to the definition, however, is “online learning, with some element of student control.” In all blended-learning programs, students do some of their learning via the Internet. This does not mean using any digital tool, such as an online graphing calculator or Google Docs. Online learning means a bigger instructional shift from a face-to-face teacher to web-based content and instruction.¹⁰

Some element of student control is critical; otherwise, blended learning is no different from a teacher beaming online curriculum to a classroom of students through an electronic whiteboard. The technology used for the online learning must shift content and instruction to the control of the student in at least some way for it to qualify as blended learning from the student's perspective, rather than just the use of digital tools from the classroom teacher's perspective. It may be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More Praise for Blended
• Title Page
• Copyright
• List of Videos
• Foreword: When Disruptive Innovation and Paradigms Collide
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Understanding
• Part 2: Mobilizing
• Part 3: Designing
• Part 4: Implementing
• Appendix Questions for Discussion
• Index
• End User License Agreement