Editor’s note: Brian Greenberg is the co-founder of Silicon Schools Fund and a former high school teacher, principal and administrator.
If 2013 was the “Year of the MOOC”, my hope is that 2014 will be the “Year of the Blend.” Just as online courses are disrupting our assumptions about higher education, our K-12 education system is brimming with enthusiasm about blending the best of online learning with the best of traditional schools. Make no mistake, it is early in this movement and the going will be hard. Most of the online learning software is still mediocre, it can be tough to implement, and we have to figure out how to provide support and inspire the nation’s teachers to play a new role in the learning process. But if we can get this right, “blended learning” has tremendous potential to dramatically improve education for students and teachers.
As a small step towards making this vision a reality, we are launching a new MOOC on the Coursera platform to help accelerate the adoption of blended learning. On October 15th, teams from the Silicon Schools Fund, the Christensen Institute, and the New Teacher Center will begin an experiment of using a MOOC to expose thousands of educators and technologists to the most interesting work being done in blended learning by some of the nation’s leading K-12 schools.
Michael Horn from Christensen Institute and Brian Greenberg from Silicon Schools Fund filming for the upcoming Blended Learning MOOC on Coursera.
Summer prototyping – blended learning pilot at Caliber Schools in Richmond, CA
Like the schools adopting new education models, our team is entering a world of online learning filled with uncertainties. With so much still unknown about the best way to use MOOCs, we are embracing the rapid prototyping approach. Rather than spend years trying to create the perfect online course, we believe it better to put out a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version of the course, make it iteratively better, and get lots of feedback from the community about how to improve the course over time. Because there is so much to be learned through doing, this MOOC is designed to get educators, technologists, and others interested in blended learning to start innovating by prototyping new models in quick and easy ways.
Prototyping and the “Lean Startup” approach are the norm in software, tech, and many other sectors. But we are just starting to see the power of rapid prototyping in education. A new organization in California, Caliber Schools, does not officially open their doors until the fall of 2014. But rather than spend the next year arguing over the ideal educational model, they boldly launched a summer school pilot a year before opening, so that they could test out their theories. Summit Public Schools used a similar approach last year to pilot elements of their new school model that deeply personalizes learning for each student. Times like after-school hours or Summer School present great opportunities to try out new approaches, because the consequences of failure are lower and we are freer to boldly innovate. When I was at Envision Schools, another Bay Area K-12 organization, we launched one of the first Khan Academy pilots with a random assignment protocol with a control group to compare the impact of a teacher using Khan Academy versus the same teacher using traditional methods. The results were fascinating; the Khan Academy class performed slightly better despite spending less time on the same material. But even more profound was what we learned from the approach. The site we setup to share our lessons, BlendMyLearning, has taken off in it’s own right and now is the home of more than two dozen education organizations around the country sharing the good and the bad of their own prototypes with blended learning.
So if you are truly interested in the potential of new school models, want to help rethink the ideal role of the teacher, and believe that we can better meet the needs and interests of each student, join us for a fascinating few weeks of learning in this MOOC. As we embrace prototyping, you’ll have a chance to try out many of these ideas yourself. Enrollment is free, open now, and the course launches on October 15th.