Ideas Behind Blended Learning

Today I felt like many of my students do with all of the information given to them in a short period of time. Regardless of all of the information I'm really only going to comment on one--blended learning. There are many ways of offering information and provide learning opportunities for students, but probably one that has become more popular over the last five years has been blended learning.

As technology has become more common, more and more people are losing the fear and the idea that it is going away is now quickly being replaced with enthusiastic acceptance. The business world knows that new products can only be produced and sold for a profit when the time is right.

Disruptive theory proposes that innovations don't become a reality that quickly. We don't see many electric cars or all power grids using electricity generated by wind farms. Between the old and the future of new products is a gap filled by hybrids. A time when two extremes are combined into a blended form.

I believe that blended learning and flipped classrooms are a hybrid between what we use to do before and what may happen in the future. I know we say that teachers will never be replaced by technology and that face to face contact with students would never produce the level of knowledge.

There is no way that we can smell a rose or feel the heat of the sun through a flat screen. We may also ask the question about how the Internet could ever support content development? That may be something to think about. We have always lectured, but have we progressed in educating our populace?

Delivery methods to improve content knowledge are certainly under study. Should we teach large number of students all together or use the web to teach a large number of students at different times. Of course you could use both approaches with the web. The same thing can be said about working with individual students. Which ever method we use, teachers have there preferences. Also, there is little research to support one arrangement over another.

We will need to explore these approaches. I can certainly see that this is a topic to investigate this spring in EDCI 6344 - Current Issues and Research in Science Education. So we'll see this again later. For now, we'll leave it at that.