Blended Learning | Curriculum Strategy & Adoption
At the close of 2012, we believe there are about 70-80 US schools that have effectively implemented comprehensive blended learning models (see our definition here). At Education Elements, we are proud to be working with about 50 of these schools and are encouraged by the early indicators of student achievement. Last year, we saw an unexpectedly rapid increase in the number of public school districts adopting blended learning models; districts like those in the Pennsylvania Hybrid Learning Initiative now account for roughly 60% of our client base. In 2013, thanks in part to RTT-D, we are expecting that growth in blended learning implementations to further accelerate and reach over 300 schools by yearend. This is incredible growth as students, teachers and administrators seek more personalized and differentiated teaching and learning. I really enjoyed Michael Horn's predictions for blended learning in 2013, so I thought I would share my wish list for 2013 as we start the new year.
1. Let’s assess completed projects only – Just as we allow students to experiment in order to learn and improve their understanding of concepts, we should afford schools the latitude to experiment with learning as well. There is no other way to advance the state of the art of instruction than to try new things in a supportive environment that allows room to iterate. While school leaders have a responsibility to avoid recklessness given what’s at stake for their current students, the reality of the trends in our academic outcomes mean that the real risk is in not taking any. I appreciate and share the urgency around determining what works and what doesn’t and sharing those findings as soon as possible. However, I saw too many first-year case studies and analyses in 2012 that, given the magnitude of the undertaking at many schools, seemed premature. Rushing to judgment disproportionately penalizes the school leaders who are the innovators, risk-takers and pioneers that we so desperately need. It is important to maintain reasonable expectations for early indicators and treat them as just that - one or two years is simply not enough time to yield conclusions about entirely new instructional models. Some of the most innovative work I see involve models that combine blended learning with other concepts like collective impact (the work we are doing with Knowledgeworks and Reynoldsburg City Public Schools) or schools exploring how to leverage blended learning to create more time for interest based learning (like our work with Cornerstone in Detroit or the work we are planning with Riverside USD). These initiatives require complex collaboration across organizations and key design contributions and engagement from faculty and administrators that can take years to get just right.
2. Let’s take digital curriculum sources seriously – The market for digital curriculum is poised for historic growth, but we’ve been here before and there are real threats to the opportunity we all envision. First, schools need to understand that fidelity of implementation drives outcomes as much as, if not more than, the content itself. By fidelity of implementation I mean a number of factors that include helping teachers adapt to new instructional techniques that take advantage of digital curriculum, training them properly on the products they will be relying on to teach, and enabling them to easily make data-driven instructional decisions every day. Second, content providers need to invest in making the shift from supplemental to core instruction. This includes cloud-based infrastructure, effective web delivery capabilities and interoperability standards that remove the lock-in risk for decision-makers. Last, school decision-makers should demand better data from their digital curriculum providers – after all, this is the primary rationale for making the move to digital curriculum in the first place. Better data means including more activity-level detail, increasing standards alignment, making it easier to move data from one place to another and generally more actionable sets of student-level data. Only then will things really get interesting for accelerating learning AND innovation.
3. Let’s invest in building better products…and using them – Good products accommodate the needs of a broad array of diverse users and leverage scale to improve affordability. This is particularly true for software products, which are hard to design well and expensive to build and maintain. So companies like Education Elements should invest in building better products that are easier to use and support a broader array of school models for the long-term. Similarly, schools, and the foundations that support them should demand well-designed products that meet their unique functional and financial needs. In industry after industry, we’ve seen that productization of software improves both its quality and affordability, but buyers need to get real about their true needs and the complete cost of building and maintaining custom software solutions.
4. Let's be realistic about what software can (and can’t) do today – The capacity of software to solve increasingly complex problems is staggering and the pace of innovation continues to increase. However, even the most advanced systems falter when confronted with the types of intellectual, social or emotional issues, that students and teachers navigate daily. For the foreseeable future, classrooms will be designed around optimizing student / teacher interactions and every process and technology innovation should be focused on elevating this relationship rather than interrupting it. This calls for the development of innovative instructional process and technique as much as software to support them. It also means schools need easy-to-use decision support tools for teachers more than they need intelligent, adaptive programs that attempt to automate important instructional decisions. I’m excited about where critical R&D in these important areas will take us in the future, but we need to remain clear-eyed on what it can reliably accomplish today.
5. Let’s get real about creating a Big Data problem worth solving ASAP – Contrary to what all the pundits, marketers and buzz words would suggest, we don’t yet have data sets in education that would qualify as “Big.” In order to apply Big Data analytics in a meaningful way, the data must be structured, significant and actionable and today’s educational data sets fall short on several fronts. Let’s begin with structure. There must be a common way to index the data in order to derive insights from it and, while common core standards alignment is a start, it is far from a solution and far from being implemented uniformly today. Next is significance, which means a consistent data set that spans a broad enough array of students and instructional activities to yield reliable insight. Today’s data sets are simply too small to yield insights that are broadly applicable because they are too high level due to infrequent assessment data points or a lack of student-level activity data. Lastly, the data needs to be actionable meaning that insights can be derived quickly and delivered to people in a position to take action – specifically teachers in the classroom. Teachers are too far removed from most student data systems and the turnaround time on insight prevents meaningful action. According to IBM, 90% of all the data collected in the world was created in the last 2 years. Twitter creates 12 terabytes (1024 gigabytes) of data a day. Given these facts, we will certainly know once we cross the Big Data threshold. Until then, let’s stay focused on creating the right types of problems rather than solving ones that don’t yet exist.
The opportunity to work with such a pioneering group of school leaders in 2012 has been a privilege and I want to congratulate each of them on their courage and initiative. It has also been incredibly rewarding to assemble such a distinguished and motivated team to help them here at Education Elements. Some would call it a dream come true, but I have a feeling that 2013 will be the beginning of something monumental.
