Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report - S4

THE BIG PICTURE

BLENDED LEARNING CHOICES
A variety of models for mixing face-to-face education and online instruction are generating lessons learned

BRICKS AND MORTAR
Technology-Rich Instruction

ROTATION MODEL

Station-Rotation Model

BY KATIE ASH
More research is needed, Ms. Patrick said, on the different models and which types are most effective with different students.

Lab-Rotation Model

ince blended learning exploded onto the K-12 scene with promises of personalized and student-centered learning, it has proliferated into dozens of different models, with educators continually tweaking and changing those methods to find the perfect balance of face-to-face and online instruction to meet the needs of their students. Interest in blended education remains high, spurred partly by research offering support for advocates’ claims that blended learning is more effective than either online or face-to-face instruction on its own. But more research is needed to determine the effectiveness of the evolving blended learning models, including best practices and which models work best for which types of students, said Susan D. Patrick, the president and chief executive officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, or inacol, an advocacy and research group based in Vienna, Va. “The more we know about the variety of blended learning models in K-12 education, the more we know we don’t know everything that’s out there,” she said. Michael B. Horn, a co-founder of the San Mateo, Calif.-based Innosight Institute, which conducts research on both education and health care, defines blended learning as the delivery of content and instruction partly through an online portal and partly in a brick-and-mortar location, in addition to individualization in time, pace, path, or place of learning. Mr. Horn and his team published a white paper in May that provided updated definitions of the classifications of different types of blended learning, a follow-up to a paper written about blended learning in 2011. The new paper whittles six categories of blended learning down to four: the rotation model, the flex model, the self-blend model, and the enriched-virtual model. However, educators are coming up with blended learning models that may not be easily classified into those four categories, said Ms. Patrick. “There’s such a diversity of different types of programs and models that are using content in different ways,” she said. “It parallels the range of student needs that are out there.”

Flipped-Classroom Model

KEYS TO SUCCESS
Still, some common themes and best practices have emerged among the diverse blended models. “The ability to pinpoint needs and the ability for teachers to use data at a very high level for individualized instruction—that’s probably the biggest change that we’ve seen over the last six years,” Ms. Patrick said. Delivering instructional content online opens the door for a wealth of data to be collected about each student, proponents of blended learning say, which provides real-time feedback for teachers, students, and parents. But making sure the data are being tracked properly can also be a challenge, said Ms. Patrick. “Both districts and schools need to look at an enterprise architecture so that their systems can generate the types of data that teachers need to know to be able to provide that direct instruction,” she said. Judy Burton is the president and ceo of the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit charter organization that operates 21 middle and high schools. The organization began piloting blended learning models last year and now operates three blended middle schools and four blended high schools. Like Ms. Patrick, Ms. Burton believes that finding the right learning-management system, and using programs that will work with that system so that students and teachers don’t have to log in and out of multiple systems, is critical. Through the blended learning pilots that Alliance College-Ready Public Schools has conducted, Ms. Burton said she has also learned to bring a “much keener eye” to selecting vendor programs. “They’re not all equal in terms of rigor and the degree to which they engage students,” she said. Ms. Burton’s organization is experimenting with a blended rotational model, in which groups of 45 students rotate between group work, online course work, and face-to-face instruction. “I see our kids so much more interested in and excited about coming
Individual-Rotation Model

EDUCATION WEEK: EVALUATING WHAT WORKS IN BLENDED LEARNING > www.edweek.org/go/elearning-blended

OCTOBER 24, 2012

http://www.edweek.org/go/elearning-blended

Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - October 24, 2012 - Special Report