RUNNING HEAD: Blended Learning in K-12 Education 1

Blended Learning in K-12 Education

Martha Rice

Texas A&M University - Texarkana

Blended Learning in K-12 Education

Blended learning occurs when an instructor designs and posts content online, often within

an application called a Learning Management System (LMS) so that students can access course

instruction in some manner while remaining part of their “brick and mortar” classroom.

Teachers who create blended learning experiences for their students can elect to have students do

little to much work online. Blended classes can have simply one online class component that

students use once or twice a year, or they can be almost wholly online. With technology

changing rapidly, the definitions of blended learning are also changing rapidly.

Blended learning is widely used in college settings, but K-12 schools and teachers face

problems implementing online class components. Administrators fear potential costs and

security risks. Teachers fear the unknown: how will blended classrooms help their students

succeed on standardized testing? How will I learn to use it? Students are frustrated that they are

not being allowed to have more opportunities to learn using technology. Schools that are using

forms of blended learning and virtual learning are using it mainly for credit recovery, which is

not its most effective use. Technology like blended learning will become the norm for

education, but experts are mixed on when and how. Like every disruptive innovation, when

technology is truly used effectively to educate K-12 students, teachers will wonder how

education ever worked without it.

Schools and Web Presences

When families move to new towns, they often use the Internet to research area schools.

Schools use district and campus websites as public relations tools and for community outreach.

School administrators urge their teachers to use school-provided professional webpages to

communicate with parents. Commonly, school sites and teacher pages contain announcements,
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resource links, online gradebook portals, and class agendas (Hill, 2008; Dunleavy, Dexter, &

Heinecke, 2007).

Some schools provide teachers with more than just a set of simple webpages. Some

teachers are able to build online courses using an LMS or Course Management Systems (CMS) .

The two most common LMS are the free Moodle and the college-standard Blackboard. Moodle

is probably used more of the two within K-12 settings. With LMS, teachers are able to go

beyond simple announcements and agendas. LMS like Moodle allow teachers to set up full

online courses including discussion boards, educational videos, training and instruction modules,

e-portfolios, collaboration portals for student groups, interactive assignments and assessments,

and assignment dropboxes. Beyond simply looking at students’ grades, parents are able to view

entire sets of coursework as guests within the class LMS (Hill, 2008; Henke, n.d.).

Learning Management and Blended Courses

LMS, which is strongly linked with blended courses, is still primarily used in high

schools rather than in middle schools or elementary schools, and then primarily only to serve

credit recovery applications. Although some teachers use Moodle with middle school and

elementary students, both Moodle and Blackboard were originally developed for use with adult

learners, and there is some question as to whether middle school and elementary school students

can use them (Oliver, Kellogg, Townsend & Brady, 2010). Scaffolding and guidance help

middle school and younger students navigate blended courses successfully and help them

become more independent and self-reliant learners (Smith & Clark, 2005; Cavanaugh, 2009;

Boller, 2008). It is important, however, that younger students experience blended learning, if

only to help ready them for high school or college blended learning.
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Digital Natives and Blended Courses

K-12 students, especially those in the lower grades, have grown up with technology, and

they need guidance from instructors to help them become proficient in using technology for

education. They have become known as digital natives and they expect to learn by using

technology, which they use informally outside school settings to learn what they want to know

(Beyers, 2009; Blackboard, 2008; Henke, n.d.). Digital natives need blended class experiences

to practice skills not only in core subjects, but also in using technology and critical thinking,

communications, and research (Blackboard, 2008). Digital natives learn best through authentic

problem solving, creating new applications for what they have learned through using technology

(Brown, 2000). Digital natives are used to multitasking. They do not learn effectively from

lectures, but from student-centered opportunities for discovery within constructivist contexts

(Beyers, 2009). This may be one reason that blended learning is not as effective as it might be:

teachers who use it are not using it as a constructivist application.

Blended courses and constructivism

Students within blended learning settings should be constructing their own

understandings through collaboration and creativity. Students should be researching and

evaluating facts to create lucid arguments for different audiences and purposes. They should be

carrying out experiments and using simulations. They should be creating multimedia products.

They should also be guided to learn about web etiquette, cybersafety, and academic honesty

(Rice, Dawley, Gasell, & Florez, 2007). Students should be working toward independence and

self-guided learning (Oliver, et al., 2007; Hill, 2008). Students should be developing their

natural strengths and interests through guided discovery using the modalities that are most

comfortable to them (Archambault, Diamond, Coffey, Foures-Aalbu, Richardson, Zygouris-Coe,

Brown, & Cavanaugh, 2010). With the mass of information available online, students are no

longer expected to know everything…they are expected to develop into self-motivated learners

who have become “mini-experts” in a few subjects. Blended learning can help students reach

these educational goals (Beyers, 2009).

Objective Credit Recovery vs. True Constructive Blended Learning

The primary use for wholesale blended learning so far in K-12 settings has been for credit

recovery, but credit recovery models, in which curriculum is presented to the student by a

teacher or faculty guide, does not take advantage of the promise of quality blended learning

(Sturgis & Patrick, 2010). Research suggests that blended learning should be carefully planned

and implemented in order to allow students to work collaboratively, using technology to

research, discover, create, and solve realistic problems. Teachers should act as facilitators

(“Blended Learning,” 2009), providing guidance and feedback to help students be successful

(Dunleavy, et al., 2007). Teachers might even pose tasks “Without Information Given” (WIG) to

allow students free reign in their constructivist learning (Nelson, 2006). True constructivism

should be allowed to thrive within the creative structure of student-centered blended learning

courses. As guide, the teacher should help students build their own understandings of curricula

and their own devises of how they should conduct their collaborations (Lakkala, et al., 2007).

In order to continue to thrive in an ever-changing global society, digital natives must

become, primarily though positive contact with technology and research, people who are

interested in continuing to learn throughout their lives, constructing truth from what they learn

(Beyers, 2009). Through blended learning (and virtual schools), students in rural or poor high

schools can take foreign language, Advanced Placement, and other courses that their schools

don’t offer, affording equity in education to all students (International Association for K-12
BLENDED LEARNING IN K-12 EDUCATION 6

Online Learning, 2011). Through blended learning, teachers and schools can reach at-risk

students, creating more interesting and meaningful learning experiences and hopefully reducing

high school dropout rates (Blackboard, 2008). Teachers can actually dedicate more time to each

student through electronic communications within a blended learning setting than they could

otherwise do in a regular classroom setting (Cavanaugh, Lowes, Scribner, Barbour, Powell,

Molen, Van Der Brown, Rose, Diamond, & Scheick, 2009). Through blended learning, teachers

can dedicate more time to individual students, targeting specific educational goals for advanced

and special needs students based on testing and assessment data (Watson, Murin, Vashaw,

Gemin, & Rapp, 2009). Students can work at paces appropriate to their educational levels and

needs (Muller, 2010). With synchronous and asynchronous applications, blended learning can

also afford students the opportunity to continue the school day and the school year by offering

curricula to be completed before and after the school day and throughout the summer, when

students traditionally lose ground (Cavanaugh, 2009).

Free Global Educations

In a world where technology is allowing anybody to educate themselves via Internet

resources, free curricula exist and are improving constantly (Jukes, McCain, & Crockett, 2010;

Richardson, 2010). The Khan Academy, which is the creation of basically one man who has

been building a database of more than 2,000 educational mini-lectures on YouTube, is one

example of the myriad of quality free educational resources available online for students of all

ages (Khan, 2011). Within blended courses, teachers are free to embed and link to these quality

educational resources to allow students remediation or enhancement anytime and anyplace they

have Internet access (Richardson, 2010). It’s estimated that within the decade, half of all

courses will have some online component. With growing financial problems facing K-12
BLENDED LEARNING IN K-12 EDUCATION 7

education, schools may begin to turn to blended learning to assign more students to qualified

teachers within smaller virtual classes (Wise, 2010), to create four-day school weeks with out-of-

school online assignments (Horn, 2009).

A Few Problems with Blended Learning

If blended learning promises some relief from teacher shortages and building costs,

however, it may require investment in technologies. Since blended learning requires computer

access, teachers in schools that do not provide 1:1 computing for their students will not be able to

continuously provide blended learning opportunities for their students (Perkins, 2006; Trotter,

2008). Although most K-12 students are eager to continue interesting blended learning units like

virtual class discussions in other places at other times, they cannot participate if they do not have

Internet access or computers outside school (Perkins, 2006). Blended learning also requires

teachers to be dedicated to its success. It is not easy to continually use an LMS. Some older

teachers do not or cannot understand the importance of technology or guided learning. To

alleviate the problems of using blended learning and LMS, school administrators will need to

provide continual support and expectations for teachers to use the technology (National

Education Association, 2006). Using LMS itself has problems. Although Moodle is a free

program, schools have to host and maintain it on their own servers (Trotter, 2008).

We are Living in the Future

Although the problems that might face wide scale adoption of blended learning exist, the

technology that digital natives have at their disposal is miraculous. Digital natives in high

school, middle school, and even elementary school, own mobile devices (cell phones and iPods)

that they can use to participate in blended classrooms (Jukes, et al., 2010). Cloud computing

applications make collaboration around the world as easy as collaboration within their
BLENDED LEARNING IN K-12 EDUCATION 8

classrooms. Digital natives in a blended classroom in rural Northeast Texas can work on

research projects with students in Malaysia or scientists in Great Britain. Through discovery

learning, teachers learn along with students. Through the cross-curricular problem solving that

blending learning should provide, students solve tasks that make them use both their creativity

and their thinking skills (Jukes, et al., 2010).

Digital natives will soon find themselves beyond Web 2.0. Already, “Web 3.0” is

creating new opportunities for “anywhere, anytime learning” with mobile phone apps allowing

cyberspace to layer into reality and virtual 3-D classrooms creating interactive and realistic

online schools (Wheeler, 2010). Educators are at a time in history when the old ways of

assessing students through testing what they have memorized is being quickly eclipsed by the

need to guide students to real-world applications of what they can discover on their own. Soon,

applications like Amazon’s System for Managing Agents in Real Time (SMART) might be used

to follow students as they work within blended courses to research online and gather evidence

that they have mastered specific topics and concepts in their individual research (Jukes, et al.,

2010).

e-Portfolios begin in K-12

Already within schools that provide LMS for blended courses, students are able to build

e-portfolios of their best work throughout their K-12 careers (Perkins, 2006; Cohn & Hibbits,

2004). As students work through course tasks in blended courses, they take ownership of their

learning and their educational products (Kirkham, Winfield, Smallwood, Coolin, Wood, &

Searchwell, 2009). Correctly structured, blended courses build communities of learners in which

students share their creations and their knowledge (Kerr, 2009). Furthermore, teachers are able

to link blended classrooms together via schoolwide LMS’s, ensuring horizontal and vertical
BLENDED LEARNING IN K-12 EDUCATION 9

alignment and continuity (Perkins, 2006). The student-centered inquiry tasks posed in blended

learning courses should cross disciplinary lines to strengthen student understanding of all core

disciplines (Lakkala, Ilomäki, & Palonen, 2007). Blended courses and LMS should be learner-

centered and engaging to the digital learner. Correctly posed, the content of a blended course

that uses an LMS is open-ended, positive, and motivates the student to produce quality responses

(Hatziapostolou & Paraskakis, 2010).

Although the future of education would seem to be wholly online classes, blended

courses are a valuable resource for students from elementary through middle school as well as

for high school, nontraditional, and college students. The technology that will enable humanity

to be self-guided in its learning is here. As education necessarily continues to be reformed,

younger and tech-savvy teachers will be the key to helping blended learning become a valuable

resource in public education.

Resources

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