Same here. OCZ has been awful as far as failure rates. I've had three of them die on me. Never again.

Another idea, train teachers on how to actually use technology for learning. I remember being approached outside a local library by a middle schooler asking if I wanted to buy a laptop. It still had school stickers on it, and I declined. I'm expecting similar fates for these tablets.

So, the data says that yes, hybrid (GOOD Hybrid) classrooms do work pretty well. The data also goes on to say that a lot of this is contextual, and really cannot be generalized. There's so much hype that forgets about entire populations of learners. I think the most important thing is to offer choice- learners will self determine what works best for them.

So, questions like this are interesting, but what I feel is more important is how effective is it going to be in the classroom? What most teachers and students are really concerned about is how can this better the student's learning and save the teacher time. Administrators care about the bottom line- the budget. If this, or any, technology meets those needs, questions about cloud privacy, and a lot of other things, go out the door.

But a very big thing to focus on is making sure the teachers know how to use the technology. That's true of any elearning solution. I've seen cases where a really robust technology was given to a school, but without sufficient professional development, it fell flat. But as more and more teachers retire, and a new generation of teachers in their 20s replaces them, technologies like these will become ubiquitous, and while questions about privacy are scary, I feel that the ability for teachers to connect with students on multiple channels is overall a positive thing.

Dear god, that would be horrifying.

So. Key findings. OnlineTraditionalHybrid for attrition and performance. Hybrid means much greater time investment. For hybrid to succeed, you need a lot of factors working together. Students need to know what they're doing. Face to face classes need to be more student centered/fluid. Faculty need to be given sufficient professional development. LMS coherence is important. Tenured faculty will want to stick with what they've been doing for years. Student body makeup is important. CS students age ~20 will do much better than veterinary students age ~40. Digital literacy matters, but can be taught. I had a lot more findings, but this is not news. One of the biggest things is that many online courses are very poorly designed from a pedagogical point of view. It's almost like you asked some person who's been teaching face to face for 20 years to teach an online course with no experience or training.

So, there are a ton of issues here that I could comment on, but the bit about professors feeling administrators are being paternalistic and refusing it flat out for those reasons is particularly interesting. After having several interviews with a head of Instructional tech at my research college, they told me that the biggest frustration was the tenure system. Tenured professors would always teach they way they had always taught, while instructional technologists at private universities could leverage more control in getting a coherent LMS environment set up. It really seemed like one of the biggest roadblocks for getting cool instructional technology implemented was somewhat political and petty in nature.

In a similar vein to the bit on smaller colleges, I later interviewed a professor at a community college who was able to implement really awesome instructional tech, and the trick there was to implement it in such a way where it saved professors time and allowed for more functional instruction. Too often it seems like another loop for them to go through, but if they provide the correct scaffolding and support on the academic side, it can be done right. It just rarely is, but that's usually caused by a number of factors all working together to create a really awful e-learning experience.

What they really need to focus on is making sure the students and teachers have all the resources they need to make this work. What I'm afraid of is this giving the Khan Academy a black eye. Still, having used himself a lot, I think the kids will prefer KA over 19 year old textbooks alone.

This is really interesting, as there is some anxiety within the public university system about tenure and LMSes, and how with the private institutions you have the freedom to implement them, whereas with public universities, there is a lot more resistance to things the faculty sees as wasteful.

Also, to run a really good flipped class, the time investment is rather insane. You might be spending less time working on powerpoint or whatnot, but you've got an email queue to deal with.

I would check out the Edupunk's guide to DIY Education, and move forward from there. Khan Academy is good for math, because you can actually test your skills, but with science education, you need some way of actually showing the process skills. Until then, though, KA should be a good refresher.

I've been doing a Master's thesis on hybrid learning, and this story is incredibly misleading. Hybrid learning doesn't equal machines teaching. It just means that the teacher is reframed as someone who has to use instructional technology more to save class time. In turn, they end up having to spend a lot more time troubleshooting course software issues, providing student tutoring, etc. We're getting to a stage where most asynchronous learning can effectively be done online. But this doesn't invalidate the need for a human being involved, and the importance of some face to face time with the instructor. The research has backed this for a long time, and this is not new information at all. In fact, I've most research suggests that hybrid learning produces better achievement results than either online or traditional modes, although the push right now is for online courses due to the flexibility they offer.

I'm not saying kids like everything on the internet. They don't. In fact, they don't do much with 99.9% of the internet, because they have zero exposure to it. They don't know how to do research on scientific things online, they don't know about the opportunities to help with ongoing research, and they don't have any real sense of internet literacy outside of youtube and facebook. My goal with this post was to get a good sense of what was out there that could help bring science to them in multiple ways- A textbook based lecture with a cool science simulation I found online is likely far more effective than a textbook lecture alone.

Hey guys, thanks for your comments, I haven't had time to read them all, but will attempt to start sifting through them over the weekend. A few things I wanted to clarify: I appreciate the plethora of worksheets, activities, etc. available online. That's very useful to a beginning teacher, since I don't have a very large library to choose from, and these things can save me the effort of trying to come up with one on my own. However, what I was looking for (and mind you, I haven't had time to sift through everything) is cool stuff that can really help them get involved in science that they can do online. If I'm teaching them a course on galaxies, and I break out galaxy zoo for a day, I think that would have a pretty cool impact. Plus, it's something that they can do on their own time if they want to. I also feel that kids should learn how to use the internet for more than facebook and youtube, but that's a whole new subject. Also, someone called BS on me saying kids were into online stuff, saying that they wouldn't be into school related online stuff. To that, I reply that they were doing a demo of standardized testing software, and the class was silent, eyes glued to the screens. It might have been the novelty of having smartbooks in the classroom, but I felt that if I could perhaps offer some more online resources and additions to their standard fare of worksheets and labs, I could give them a more thorough education. Thank you for everyone for posting. Some of the posts I've clicked on have been very insightful, and I deeply appreciate the time and effort you have put into them. If you have any suggestions, email me or stop by my blog. Thanks.

Not all kids have smartphones, plus, it might be hard to justify to an administrator why students should be taking their cell phones out during school time, even if it is probably the cheapest solution.

Amazing, the Ralph bit at the end is hilarious.