In a recent lynda.com interview about his book Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, Ken Robinson briefly touched on the role of online education. In the sketch notes above I have depicted one of his main ideas – that online eduction can provide an individualized curriculum for each student, but that good teachers can do that too.
I appreciate this balanced approach. I currently have one foot in the door of online education and another foot in the classroom: I teach an online statistics course for high school students and I substitute teach in the Portland area. The stats course is my first exposure to online teaching, and while I do see a lot of potential with online education, I think that I prefer being in the classroom. Ultimately I believe that a blended model of education (with an online component and an in-class component) holds the most potential. As I think about transitioning to full-time classroom teaching I am beginning to feel out what my version of that blend will look like.