Hybrid Learning

This is a snippet of a great lecture from William R. Mattox, Jr., a Resident Fellow at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida, given at the Heritage Foundation's annual Resource Bank meeting in April 2011. Click on the title to go right to the entire article. It's worth your time!

The Promise of Online Learning

Even a non-techie like me can find merit in online learning’s promise to help transform education. That’s because digital education is what Michael Horn of the Innosight Institute has called a “disruptive innovation.” Online learning challenges almost all of the prevailing assumptions about how schooling should be structured.

• It permits students to learn any time of day, during any time of year, from any location that has Internet access.
• It allows students to work at their own pace, advancing from one level to the next when they have achieved mastery of a subject matter rather than after completing 180 days of seat time in the classroom.
• It permits students to learn from teachers who may live across town or in a remote part of the state or halfway around the globe.
• And it permits learners to benefit from market competition, since all that is required for one to “switch schools” or to “change classes” is a click of the mouse.