Earlier this year, Larry Cuban and I had a brief back-and-forth about the prospects for online learning — particularly with regards to helping/harming students most at-risk. Fortunately, Education Next has just published an article exploring this very issue.

In “Getting At-Risk Teens to Graduation: Blended learning offers a second chance,” June Kronholz writes about PerContinue Reading »

At 27, after six years working on youth service-learning, literacy, and a variety of issues to strengthen community-based nonprofit organizations, I entered business school. In one way, it was an odd choice. I knew little about high finance and, growing up in the Gordon Gekko / Barbarians at the Gate / Bonfire of the Vanities culture of the late 1980s, harbored an almost instinctive distrust toContinue Reading »

Stanford Emeritus Professor, education historian, and noted education technology realist/skeptic Larry Cuban sets out to throw a “dash of cold water on overheated hyperbole” around online and blended learning.

In his post, Cuban outlines two potential losses from the move towards more online learning. The first is equity:

And the losses? Another digital divide. StudentContinue Reading »

An article that made sweeping generalizations about whether traditional classroom learning “works” would be laughable: we understand that the specific details, program models, curriculum, and of course, teachers, matter. Yet, when discussing online learning, broad generalizations about radically different programs and teaching models are accepted at face value.

The recent NewContinue Reading »

Lots of buzz around blended learning — the idea that we shouldn’t limit ourselves to a forced choice between teachers and technology, but can strive to find the right combination of high tech and high touch teaching. If you want to understand what this looks like in practice, I recommend “Future Schools,” a new article from Education Next.

As we think about these Continue Reading »

The recent New York Times article, In Florida, Virtual Classrooms with No Teachers, takes us to Miami, where schools are using a blended learning approach:

As I wrote a few years ago, the future for education is neither a fully virtual nor a parallel system, but an integrated one. The overwhelming majority of students will continue to attend physical schools. However, increasing numbers of students will also take courses or parts of courses online, moving back and forth seamlessly between the traditional and virtual—just as they do in every other Continue Reading »

Quick Hits is a short compilation of question-raising news stories, blog posts, and video clips that Education Sector team members are reading and viewing each day.