Blended Learning I

For the past four weeks, in addition to hosting a Chinese teacher, making decisions about snow days, and determining whether we have anything to learn from the Tiger Mother, I’ve been taking a course entitled “Introduction to Blended Learning” offered by the Online School for Girls.  Our own Director of Academic Technology, Craig Luntz and Melissa Wert, the Technology Integration Specialist at Harpeth Hall, a girls school in Nashville, TN which, with Holton, is one of the founding members of OSG, taught the course. 

First, a little background on the Online School for Girls: In 2009, Holton-Arms joined three other girls schools, Harpeth Hall in Nashville, Laurel in Cleveland, and Westover in Washington, CT, in founding the Online School for Girls.  Our intent was to create a program that took what we knew about how girls learn best and apply it to virtual learning.  We started by offering three classes in the fall of 2009; and next year the roster includes 12 semester and full year courses  including AP Computer Science, AP Music Theory, Japanese, Genetics, Intro to Human Anatomy, Physiology, and Disease and Intro to Animation.  For the first time, OSG is teaching summer courses including Review of Algebra I, a writing course, intro to computer programming, and courses to help students transition from the second to third year levels in French and Spanish.  Eight other schools have joined the original four as consortium members while twenty-seven schools have taken advantage of affiliate status.

The percentage of students taking online courses nationwide is expanding at an exponential rate.  Last year, 1.5 million K-12 students were enrolled in at least one online course;[i] this represents more than a 50% increase in five years.   Some kind of online learning is available to students in 48 states plus the District of Columbia and 27 states and DC have established statewide virtual high schools.  The largest of those, the Florida Virtual School, enrolled 220,000 students in 2009-10.  Michigan and Alabama both require students to take on online course to receive a high school diploma.  Business writers, Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, in their influential Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns predict that by 2019, approximately half of all US high school classes will be taken online[ii]; according to their calculations, the percentage will grow to 80% by 2024.[iii]   We noticed this trend in education, and decided not to ignore it, but rather to embrace it. 

All OSG courses are taught by teachers from member schools, and experience quickly taught that teaching online is quite different from face-to-face teaching.  This insight prompted OSG to launch professional development courses for teachers.  This is the third time OSG has offered the four week course I took and there were enough sign-ups to run two sections of 22 students each.  In addition to Dena Greene and Ann Vaughn from Holton, my classmates included teachers and administrators from across the country and two from the American School in Bombay. 

But it’s very possible that you’re thinking, all that’s fine, but what is blended learning?  Actually, that’s a good question and one to which there is no set answer.  For the purposes of this course, blended learning was defined as “courses that combine face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning and reduced classroom contact hours (reduced seat time)"[iv].  So what makes it blended is that teaching and learning take place both online and in a traditional classroom setting, as opposed to a purely online class or solely in face-to-face setting.   iNACOL (the international Association of k-12 online Learning) predicts that blended learning "is likely to emerge as the predominant teaching model of the future"[v] .

The emergence of online learning as a major factor in education prompted my taking the blended learning class.  I also knew that I would learn about key technological resources so that I would better understand what is available to teachers.  I wanted not just to learn about the resources, but actually try them out; to find out how easy or hard it might be to master them; and to explore firsthand the opportunities and challenges to employing these resources in our teaching.

I would divide what I learned into two categories: 1) mastering various specific technical vehicles; 2) developing an understanding of the applications for these vehicles in an educational setting as well as the theoretical aspects of blended learning.  There is layering here: when using technology, you need to understand the vehicle’s potential to understand how to apply it; you will understand that potential better if you have actually tried to use it yourself. 

Quite honestly, once you start playing around with the tools, ideas for their utilization naturally emerge.  In addition, when you are taking a class where others are also experimenting with the same technology, you benefit from the sharing of ideas among classmates.  In addition, because the blended learning class takes place on line, you are both learning the technology and learning online simultaneously, another layering aspect of the experience. 

The course used Voicethread and discussion boards extensively.  I had used discussion boards a little before – they basically consist of posting a comment to which others can respond and vice versa.  In essence, you have a written online conversation amongst a group of people. Like discussion boards, all of our teachers have access to Voicethread, and a number of them have already integrated into their teaching.  Voicethread allows you to write, record, or film your comments, so it offers a more personal format.   For my first Voicethread, in which I was supposed to introduce myself, I prepared notes and redid my submission three or four times.  I also had to get accustomed to simple things such as where to position myself for the computer camera.  By the end of the four-week course, though, I was producing Voicethreads with the ease of writing an email or making a phone call.  This is very user friendly-  technology.

For one assignment, we had to use a brainstorming tool called bubbl (bubbl.us).  Here I encountered some frustration because we were supposed to accompany our bubbl diagram with a recorded explanation.  I tried three times to add my explanation without success; finally, I switched from video to a voice recording and it worked.  This was the one time that the teacher’s explanation of how to use the tool did not prove detailed enough and it highlighted the importance of thorough instructions, a fact stressed in one of the articles we read.

We also had to learn how to make a screencast.  In a screencast, you film what is happening on the computer screen with accompanying commentary.  When you’ve seen a video that demonstrates how to go through a series of steps on a computer – for example, how to use a new software program, you’ve watched a screencast.  You look at something like that and think, how would I ever be able to do that?  However, with tools like screencast-o-matic (www.screencast-o-matic.com), it’s actually remarkably simple. 

More specifically, in that assignment, we were supposed to use the screencast to describe a tool or resource to our classmates.  Once again there were layers.  In my case, I chose to demonstrate something called Prezi.  Prezi is a free presentation tool somewhat similar to powerpoint, but much more dynamic.  I had seen it used and was intrigued to learn it for myself.  So I had to learn two programss: screencasting and Prezi.  This was my favorite assignment and from a time and technological perspective, it was the hardest.  But successfully mastering the rudiments of Prezi (which is very cool) and creating a screencast that explained it proved tremendously gratifying.

As an added benefit, we also learned about the resources and tools that other people presented.  I discovered wolfram-alpha (www.wolframalpha.com), a site that describes itself as a “computational knowledge engine.”  You can enter a mathematical expression and it will give you multiple different ways to understand the equation: graph, geometric form, alternate forms of the equation, roots, derivatives, indefinite integral, global minimum, etc, etc – from algebra 1 to calculus.  And the site doesn’t just do math – you can find demographic information about a country and then compare to other countries; or statistics associated with a professional sports team; or the normal lung capacity and body mass index of a human of any given height and weight.  Amazing!

Someone else shared the Google Art Project (www.googleartproject.com).  On this site you can explore the collections at museums all over the world.  The Metropolitan in New York or Versailles or the Uffizi all wait for the click of your mouse and you can move from room to room, zooming in on individual works of arts to a point where you can even see brushwork.  And again, it’s all free! 

I accomplished all that I hoped and more.  I learned a lot about the resources that are available for teachers, some of which have uses for administrators.  I learned that there are a huge array of resources out there, some of which may be more useful than others.  And I learned that they are all quite accessible and easy to use – not more than an hour or a 3-4 tries achieves mastery of the rudiments and allows one to use the tools with some facility.  Technology can be intimidating both because we think it will be complicated and because we don’t think we have the time to master it.  I would say these characteristics no longer pose obstacles– quite the opposite.  The challenge is that there are so many useful tools available that knowing where to start and how to find them can be overwhelming.  The web comes to the rescue here, too, with sites like ISTE (International Society for Technology in Learning) Learning (www.istelearning.org) that provide direction. 

However, the implications of this technology go way beyond simply being able to record a voicethread, create a nifty Prezi presentation, or be presented with all the aspects of a calculus problem.  As we think about technology as a “disruptive innovation” in education, to use Christensen, Horn and Johnson’s phrase, it is these implications that stand out as truly important, something I now understand much better than I did five weeks ago.  We’ll talk about that next week.

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[i] John Watson, Amy Murin, Lauren Vashaw, Butch Gemin, and Chris Rapp, Keeping Pace With K-12 Online Learning: An Annual Review of Policy and Practice, 2010,( iNACOL)

[ii] Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (2008), 98

[iii] Christensen, Horn, and Johnson, 102

[iv] Dziuban, Charles D., Joel L. Hartman, and Patsy D. Moskal. Blended Learning.
      Boulder, CO: Educause, 2004. Research Bulletin 2004.5: Educause. Web. 15 June 2010, 2.
     <http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERB0407.pdf>

[v] Watson, John. Blending Learning: The Convergence of Online and Face-to-Face
     Education. Vienna, VA: North American Council for Online Learning, 2008.
     Promising Practices in Online Learning. North American Council for Online
     Learning. Web. 10 June 2010. <http://www.inacol.org/research/
     promisingpractices/NACOL_PP-BlendedLearning-lr.pdf>, 4.