Guest Commentary: Innosight Institute Wonders if There is Trouble Ahead for Blended Learning?

Heather Clayton Staker is a Senior Research Fellow for the Education Practice at Innosight Institute. She recently took a look at the burgeoning field of blended learning programs, and she was worried by what she found.
"I’ve been troubled especially by early signs that government is starting to define and encode blended learning. Online learning, which involves the Internet delivering instruction and content to students, has been around for several years. But blended learning, meaning learning that takes place when online instruction blends into brick-and-mortar schools, is quite new. Policymakers are just starting to notice it. Their efforts so far have concerned me," Staker wrote.
"In one state (name withheld), a few legislators kicked around the idea of authorizing up to 25 'blended-learning demonstration programs' in schools throughout the state. The demonstration sites would weave online learning together with face-to-face instruction and have one year to measure results. If effective, the program could expand to more schools.
"Other state legislators recently debated the merits of allowing paraprofessionals, meaning adults without teaching licenses, to supervise students working online and thereby allow credentialed teachers time to pull aside clusters of students for small-group face-to-face instruction," she continued.
"In a third conversation, a national education group grappled with whether it should begin to pressure all states to define blended learning in law, and whether that the definition should specify that blended learning must include both online and face-to-face learning methods.
"The problem," Staker added, "with all three of these ideas is that codifying any of them into law will not improve education, and even worse, will likely prevent viable blended-learning models from coming to fruition before they get a fair chance to play out."
Click here to read Staker's complete post and her solutions.