#T509 Project Update 10/15!
The past few weeks have been spent surveying the field of blended learning practitioners. The most fruitful source of information so far has come from Julia Freeland from the Clayton Christiansen Institute for Disrputive Innovation (CCIDI) out in the Bay Area.
Those in HGSE's T509: Massive class with me will recall Julia's presentation in class last week on what constitutes disruptive innovation, a look at different school models, and some of the technical aspects involving blended learning.
I've followed up with Julia to help give me some feedback on the project, and I have an in-person meeting scheduled with her tomorrow, where I'll finalize my list of schools, survey questions, and then update my project deadlines!
Additionally, I've completed a first round of informal literature review on the subject. As my project is largely research based, I'm coming up with a list of useful resources that have guided my project so far. Many of them come from CCIDI's blog posts, but I'm also working on getting through Blended Learning Research Perspectives II. I'm beginning to get the sense that I should also compile useful statistics about the benefits of blended leanring classrooms, because while I have the theoretical understanding and the ideological underpinnings of the movement, facts about student improvement are perhaps the most persuasive case for scaling blended learning environments to more students in more districts.
One of the unfortunate trends I'm starting to see emerging is that it's a lot easier to institute a "disruptive" learning environment in new charter schools. This isn't to say that charter schools are bad; in fact, I'm a huge supporter of them, overall. But since I'm looking at how current institutions can flip their classrooms and utilize technology more efficiently by changing their school structure, I'm starting to see some barriers that strongly suggest charting new school designs might be a better path than changing existing ones in order to best support the blended learning movement. Does that mean students currently at face-to-face schools in areas without charter district support are at a disadvantage? Perhaps, but I want to change that.
