Believe it or not, you may already be teaching in a somewhat blended learning environment. Consider the following story involving a wildly popular, technophobic government teacher, Mr. Hill, and how he discovered he’d facilitated a blended learning environment without even realizing it.
DOUGLAS RETURNS THE FAVOR
Mr. Hill was a very successful government instructor at his local high school. Most of the students went on to college and had fond memories of their experiences with their charming and challenging senior-year teacher. An unapologetic technophobe, Mr. Hill always made the case—with great wit, volume, and exaggerated gesticulation—that technology and learning at a distance were leading to a cataclysmic erosion in creativity, brainpower, and the advancement of the human condition. He was one of those rare teachers who could lecture consistently and hold the students in the palm of his hand. His stories were legendary, and his anecdotes were state-of-the-art cliff-hangers that kept students remarkably engaged. Unlike his teacher colleagues, he did not have a website and didn’t post assignments or discussion notes online.
When a former student, Douglas, returned from college to visit Mr. Hill on the Friday before spring break, “the good Prof Hill,” as Douglas called him, was delighted to see him. As a student, Douglas had been curious, thoughtful, and exceedingly well-read. While in high school, he was willing and able to engage Mr. Hill on a variety of topics, and their debates were legendary and thoughtfully humorous. Given their past penchant for debate, Mr. Hill seized on the fact that Douglas, now a student at a very prestigious Ivy League university, was taking one of his core classes online. With great volume and humorous gesticulation, Mr. Hill chided Douglas for his online learning, professing the inevitable downfall of civilization thanks to the crushing press of an overly digitized world. After taking a breath from his rant, Mr. Hill waited for Douglas to respond. With a small smile creeping on his face, Douglas simply said, “Your class is online already, my good Prof Hill.”
For once, Mr. Hill was silent, then he smiled indignantly. “No, really, it is,” Douglas continued. After gracefully popping open his laptop, Douglas took Mr. Hill on a virtual tour that the teacher would never forget. Mr. Hill’s lecture notes, taken by his students, were posted and shared on Google Docs. Given Mr. Hill’s popularity, numerous former students had compiled copious amounts of interactive feedback about his class content online. There was also a Facebook page dedicated to “Hillisms,” with feedback and commentary from current students as well as those who had graduated a decade or more earlier. On a blog, students discussed course content, replete with scholarly references, YouTube links, and Snapchat rants to underscore their points. Douglas told Mr. Hill about the hours he had spent studying for his midterm and final, armed with group-text exchanges, instant-message-fueled cries for help from classmates, and a number of other seemingly endless digital connections reflecting on Mr. Hill’s class.
Mr. Hill is an amazing teacher who engages his students and stimulates their curiosity and love for civics. Despite his attempt, however, to keep his learning environment synchronous, Mr. Hill’s class had been summarily infiltrated by the technology tools of the day, adding asynchronous elements that undoubtedly enriched the learning experience for so many students. The brilliant Professor Hill always made Douglas think about things in new ways. On that day, Douglas returned the favor.
We share this story about Mr. Hill to reinforce the notion that, in many cases, asynchronous learning is already happening in our schools, whether we like it or not. It’s almost impossible to deliver face-to-face content that isn’t directly or indirectly assisted by tools that bring an asynchronous element to the learning process. This is important to note because technology isn’t going away, and we’re better off as a profession being strategic and purposeful about the tools at our disposal. Perhaps Mr. Hill could build on the asynchronous efforts going on around him and make his very good class even better. Of course, doing so will force him to carefully consider how to plan and develop his new online curriculum.
How to Plan and Develop an Online Curriculum
Developing an online curriculum that facilitates DEL requires you to think deeper about the nuts and bolts of your digital learning environment. The way in which the curriculum is presented makes a big difference in the degree to which the facilitator can personalize and tweak instruction to meet individual student needs. It also makes a difference in the way facilitators use and administer assignments and assessments in the course. Consider the following questions about curriculum and planning.
■ Did someone else already establish and write your digital learning curriculum? If so, you are working with a curriculum that some other instructional designer from your area established. It may even come from an outside vendor who created a program that your school utilizes. In this case, your focus is on how to facilitate, further illuminate, and enhance what is already there.
■ Is the curriculum open shell? With an open shell option, your school provides the course shell and the instructor engages in the planning, design, and delivery of instruction. Clearly this is a more challenging option. However, we also think that this is an option that drives the deepest level of innovation. Since the mid-2000s, many schools have successfully utilized prepackaged curricula; however, we believe that, as our culture becomes increasingly comfortable with digital learning options, schools will become more adroit at designing and delivering their own digital learning experiences. Without question, engaging in the design and development of digital learning experiences always enhances the process of working with colleagues to share ideas on planning and innovation strategies.
■ Who can join? Most DEL platforms fall into one of two categories of membership: open or closed.
♦ When membership is open for a digital learning experience, it includes learners who come together from a broad or potentially limitless geographic location (DuFour & Reason, 2016). A massive open online course (often called a MOOC) is just one example of a type of digital learning experience that is available to anyone, with participants allowed to engage the learning in almost any way that meets their needs (Crow, 2013).
♦ A closed digital learning experience includes students from either a previously established learning group, such as an existing German 4 class that elects to work together online, or a recognized group of students who are assigned to a particular digital learning experience. Under this permutation, students may know one another before the learning experience, and the participants are derived from an organized grouping, such as from their local school or a charter school digital academy (DuFour & Reason, 2016). Most of the strategies in this book work most directly with this second, more common, K–12 closed digital learning option. Both options, however, have their place in online learning environments.
Given these differences, developing a curriculum that facilitates digital learning experiences represents a diverse set of challenges. Nuanced distinctions will emerge because of these different delivery formats and decision points, and we have constructed our recommendations in this book with these variances in mind. You will notice that we occasionally call out these differences and describe how facilitators may have to change their approach based on the differences in delivery we describe. However, for the most part, we assemble approaches that work in most of the aforementioned settings.
With this established, all the careful planning in the world may not mean much if the people using these online learning environments cannot work together with the provided tools.
Technophiles and Technophobes: Ending the Cage Match
Technophobes