How Blended Learning Increased Enrollment

I previously posted about how blended learning saved my life, focusing mostly on the problems I faced as a teacher and how blended learning solved them.

This post will focus on how blended learning improved my class in ways that wouldn’t be possible in a traditional classroom, or at least extremely difficult.

Branching

In a traditional classroom, each student must learn the same content, work on the same assignments, and work at the same pace as the other 30+ students in the period. With all of my lessons and assignments online, students could participate at their own pace, and once I prepared for it, they could work on what interested them most at the time.

Blended learning already takes a significant investment, and to develop branching it requires even more, but in both cases, the investment was paid back in full, plus interest, plus dividends.

A concern many teachers have when I present this idea is that of motivation. How will you make sure students actually work when they don’t have specific direction? The answer is in how you introduce branching, and how soon. At first, perhaps you give them the choice of a few different assignments in a unit. (Quick students will often do all of them.) Then you offer a bonus unit toward the end of the term to keep quick students occupied, which is a sort of cheat in order to be able to start everyone off at the same spot the next term.

In my classes, the first term was pretty structured, and then the second term I only had two units that everyone worked through, after which a bunch of units were ‘unlocked’ for students to pick and choose what to work on and when.

Hippie Additive Grading

Since the beginning of time, or at least as long as I’ve been in the education system, teachers pre-determined the amount of work to be completed during the term or semester, and students received grades based on how much of it they completed, and how well.

This is a hard paradigm to break. So much of our education system revolves around putting kids in grade levels and making sure they all develop at the same pace, holding schools accountable for students who can’t keep up. Blended learning, with its enabling of self-paced work and branching, completely disrupts the idea of keeping all students together, and makes it very difficult to assign a term grade to each student.

I know this is sounding more like a con than a pro to blended learning, but stick with me. First, I arbitrarily came up with an amount of points that could/should be earned in a class period: 10 points per 45 minute class period. Next, with each assignment and project, I estimated how long it would take to complete, and assigned it that many points. I toggled a feature in the Canvas gradebook that made it show me points earned rather than a percentage. Now each student’s grade was simply an amount of points earned.

The students’ scores still varied wildly, and I was OK with that. I had some students who earned 150 points in a term, and others over 500. In a traditional setting, I would have been able to expect maybe 300 points, and the 150 point student would’ve earned half that. So even though it looked like he was under-performing, he was actually doing more than usual. Now the issue was how to assign the letter grade that the district required?

This is where the hippie comes in. In college, one of my professors talked about his days as a teacher, and how he let students help determine their own grade. I joked with him that he was a hippie, but as I gained more experience in the classroom myself, I found myself veering in that direction as well. I determined that the points earned would only be 34% of their final grade. I looked at all the points students earned and came up with a max score. Even if that max score were 300, the student who earned 150 points would be OK. Another 33% was participation, so as long as you showed up to class and worked on something, I didn’t take any points away. The last 33% was self-evaluation.

In the end, the points the students earned on their assignments meant much less than in a traditional classroom, yet they typically completed more work. The misconception about teenagers is that they’re lazy and only want to waste time and screw around. The truth is that they just want meaningful projects to work on, and they want to feel successful. I know this because I used to give them free days where they could play games. About halfway through the 45 minute period, they’d be bored. I switched it to be a free day to work on whatever they wanted. That was a lot more motivating to them.

Originally published at RCLX.