We’ve learned a few things during Covid.
What could/ should happen going forward in US education?
- Blended Learning needs to become all that it can be.
- Federal, State, and Local entities such as school districts, need to be organized into an efficient structure that can fund, develop, install and enable… innovative learning technologies.
- Problem areas, hurdles, and bureaucratic pushback needs to be identified, and routed around, and through.
- Perhaps models for effective public private partnerships can be invoked, and modeled from…such as DARPA, for just one example
Currently “Blended Learning” is a label in search of a reality. It could take many differerent forms. An LA teacher I know in a private school says that she is currently teaching in a “blended” environment, where she is in a classroom with some students, and other students are attending virtually at the same time. She says that’s very very hard to do. Other definitions of blended learning entail a certain number of days in a physcial classroom, alternated in some fashion with days virtually present. There are many other potential enactments of “Blended Learning”.
Because achieving all that Ed Tech can accomplish perforce requires elements from many different fields working together as one, some form of architecture that can accomplish this is needed. Generally that falls to a governmental body that can aggregate and distribute funds, and guide and enable innovation toward specific goals. RFPs, for example.
The Current Educational Establishment is by definition limited by all that currently exists…what is gets in the way of what could be. Legislation and work arounds, are needed, as well as some way to involve local expertise as a driving force. Some way of distributing the warehousing function of schools amongst the parents and community needs to be conceived; possibly through a “community schools” model.
As with most ambtious projects, one first searches for circumstances where promising experiments and innovation are already taking place. Fortunately, the US is ripe/ rife with such projects to learn/borrow from. And we do have some forms of public private partnerships that we can lean on as well.
The “Infrastructure Bill” currenlty in the sausage factory stage, could help establish and address all 4 of the above.
Leadership is of course needed, and an “Educcation Champion” needs to arise that’s up to the task.