Blended Learning - Buzzword or Insightful Practice?

Hello everybody. This week in tech class we discussed blended learning. Before we begin, let me give you the definition that most of the resources used for blended learning. According to Christensen, Horn and Staker and the Christensen Institute, “The definition of blended learning is a 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;
• ·         at least in part in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home;
• ·         and the modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience.”

This class is a good example of this definition of blended learning. We meet most every week in a classroom for face-to-face instruction and discussion on a topic. Then we are given some online resources to continue our learning at our own pace over the next week. The week we are given to review the curated content also gives the inquisitive time to choose other ways to investigate the topic that we can then use to inform our learning. We also have a couple longer term projects that are part of the course that we have a significant amount of time deal with them. As with the regular assignments, we are free to work out our own schedule for these projects, as long as we meet the course requirements.

I spent a bit of time considering what Christensen, Horn and Staker mean by the last bullet point, but (I hate to say) it seems like some fancy words to say that the on-line and classroom stuff need to be related to the same topic. (Interesting tid-bit, the Christensen Institute originally documented the definition to include the first two bullet points after a 2010 survey of educators and organizations that were early adopters of blended learning. They added the third bullet themselves. I’m using foreshadowing here, because I’ll provide a link to the relevant paper later.) Maybe if I dig very deep into this subject, I’ll see the need for this clarification, but for now it seems a bit superfluous to me.  Maybe they had to say it because students were following a path that led to learning but did not meet the objectives of the course. While of course any learning is good, it’s a bit silly for me to think I’ll get credit for my tech class by spending time to learn how to homebrew a tasty oatmeal stout. Sure, I learned something, but….

Next, I’ve been asked to give my philosophy of blended learning. At first, I thought this would be easy. We’ve always been doing blended learning, in my mind. Even back in the 80’s when I was in high school, we would have projects that extended over a portion of the term, so we had some control of time. The paths we could follow were generally whatever information was available at the library. By no means did a typical 1980’s public library rival the amount of stuff available on today’s web, it was generally more and different than our texts and teachers’ lectures. So, I was ready to dismiss this as consultant’s adding “on-line” as a buzzword to sell services, software and hardware.

When trying to find an original source for the definition, and I came across the white paper by Christensen, Horn and Staker entitled Is K-12 Blended Learning Disruptive? An Introduction of the theory of hybrids. I highly recommend reading this. Even if you only read the executive summary, it’s informative to see how they brought the on-line aspect into the definition. They explain things much better than I can, but I’ll try to summarize.  Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, teaches his key-concept of disruptive innovation. On Christensen’s website and in the white paper mentioned earlier, he discussed disruptive innovations as those that aren’t trying to necessarily produce better products, but to change what the market thinks is good.  Horn and Staker build on this business theory in the paper and their books to claim that totally on-line schools were the disruptors to education process. They weren't necessarily trying to improve education, they were trying to change it.
In contrast, sustaining innovations are those that try to continually perfect the existing technology. In the case of education, this would be the constant march to find new and better classroom techniques and instructional models. What these authors then claim to be “blended” is actually a hybrid of sustaining and disruptive innovations. It’s taking the best from both paths and combining them to better meet the needs of the consumer. For education, the reason they refer to on-line requirements isn’t because on-line is inherently good, it just gives so much faster access to information for students. In the past, I might have found these other sources through traditional sources, but since I can search and have different info pop onto my laptop as I sit at the kitchen table, the ease made it so I would actually do it.

So, after a whole bunch of words, what do I think of blended education? It really isn’t anything different than what educators and organizations should always be doing. Look around and find new ways of doing something. Evaluate them and add the good to what you are already doing, eliminating the less effective from your current method. For example, the fact that blended is considered on-line and face-to-face takes the ease of on-line information as the good and prunes the general negative of limited growth through personal discussions on the topics as is available in brick-and-mortar classrooms. On the sustaining side, blended eliminates the restriction of relying on one or two curated sources and opens up the world of the internet to students.

Summing up, with the background of looking at this from the source of Christensen, Staker and Horn’s seminal work, for education,

BLENDED GOOD!

STAGNANT BAD!

So I'd have to say "Insightful Practice." What do you think?