Module 1: Introduction

Welcome to our MOOC on blended learning and thanks for joining us. If you've already watched our intro video for this course, then this might be a little bit repetitive for you, but bear with us because we're trying to make sure everyone's starting from the same place. What we're interested in this class is high quality blended learning, how to do it really, really well to make it student centered, which is dramatically different from today's education system that's built like a factory to treat all students the same.

So look, this is a buzzword and we know that blended learning, for us, this is not about promoting it simply as a silver bullet. This is not going to fix everything in our world, but we do think this is a very strong potential game changer in education. This is different than previous edtech movements though, because it's not just about the tech. It's about redesigning classrooms and schools from the ground up to better meet the needs of each and every individual learner.

So let's introduce who we are. I'm Robert Schwartz. I'm senior advisor at the New Teacher Center. The New Teacher center is a leading provider of products and services for beginning teacher development. I've been a teacher, a principal, chief academic officer in both charter and public schools.

I'm Michael Horn and I'm the executive director of the education practice at the Clayton Christensen Institute. We're a non profit think tank focused on innovation in education and we've been researching the blended learning field since its early days.

And I'm Brian Greenberg from the Silicon Schools Fund. We are a foundation that makes grants on the cutting edge of the blended learning movement. And I've been an in the trenches educator as a teacher principal running a network of charter schools as well as working in the district setting.

So in this course we're going to focus on blended learning that truly personalizes for each student. That means meeting each student where they are with any activity that they need, when they need it, be it group instruction, private tutoring, online simulation, or learning, whatever the situation requires to meet that child's learning needs. The second thing we're really going to focus on in this course is what we call mastery based learning. And mastery based learning, which is also called competency based learning or proficiency based learning, is a really important concept. The big idea here is that students move on once they've mastered a concept.

Michael and Brian are clearly the experts in blended learning. What I'm here to do is help break down the assignments for you and apply what you're learning from the videos we do believe strongly in mastery based education so if you believe that you can complete the assignments without the videos and other resources, go for it. Just skip ahead. In fact, we've tried to design the course as much as possible to facilitate that by putting the quizzes and the assignments up front. In fact we even put the final assignment up front already so all you need to go is go to the assignment page and read it and see if you can already tackle it.

But it's okay if you don't already know everything there is to know about blended learning and can already tackle that final assignment. In fact we built this course to scaffold and deliver the information to you that you'll need not only to know a lot about blended learning but to put it into practice in your context.

So enough of our long introduction. Let's tackle this idea of high quality blended learning and we'll do that in our next segment and with our first assignment.