The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning — Michael Horn
Online learning is sweeping across America. In the year 2000, roughly 45,000 K–12 students took an online course. In 2009, more than 3 million K–12 students did. What was originally a distance- learning phenomenon no longer is, as most of the growth is increasingly occurring in blended-learning environments, in which students learn online in an adult-supervised environment at least part of the time. As this happens, online learning has the potential to transform America’s education system by serving as the backbone of a system that offers more personalized learning approaches for all students.
This week Innosight Institute released a report about this phenomenon and opportunity titled “The rise of K-12 blended learning.”
Written in conjunction with the Charter School Growth Fund and Public Impact, my coauthor and colleague Heather Staker and I use the report to try to bring clarity to a field that has had multiple definitions over what blended learning is. Ours is an overarching one…