In 2008, Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn predicted in Disrupting Class that 50 percent of high school courses would be online in some form or fashion by 2019. They made this prediction by applying the theory of disruptive innovation to the K–12 education sector. The book was titled Disrupting Class for a reason: schools served important social, custodial, and community functions for both students and parents and would be around for a long time to come. What stood to change—to be “disrupted”—was how we delivered content inside our brick-and-mortar classrooms by integrating technology into new instructional models.
To understand more about how that transformation would take place, the Clayton Christensen Institute began visiting dozens of schools across the country that were implementing online learning. These observations led us to create an early definition of blended learning and a taxonomy of blended-learning models for the purpose of creating a shared language for the K–12 blended-learning sector.
Along the way, we developed a growing rolodex of blended-learning schools that we wanted to make public to the world. After the release of Blended we launched the BLU, which included a searchable directory of blended-learning schools. A handful of iterations later, we are pleased to re-launch the BLU and most notably to release some exciting updates to our school directory.
This updated directory will feature:
- Advanced search capabilities that allow users to search for schools by demographic, location, blended-learning model, and more
- Profiles of schools and their blended-learning programs that provide information regarding test scores, EdTech products, implementation challenges, and more
- The ability for schools all over the world to create their own blended-learning profiles detailing how they are implementing blended learning
- A timeline feature that allows users to see what changes schools have made to their blended-learning programs over time
We hope this directory will serve as a powerful resource for school leaders, teachers, researchers, policymakers, and parents with a vested interest in using blended learning to transform our monolithic, factory-model learning system into a student-centered one. Up to this point, we have created the majority of the profiles ourselves, but we are now eager to let schools create their own profiles in order to highlight how blended learning is transforming learning for children across the world.
The updated directory is just the tip of the iceberg. In order to help this growing network of school leaders in as many ways we can, we plan to update the BLU resources and regularly add blog posts and other content highlighting the successes, challenges, and potential of blended learning in schools everywhere.
If you know of any schools or organizations that ought to be a part of this directory, please invite them to SIGN UP HERE.
