An glimpse into the future of blended learning...

I have been administering moodle for almost ten years.   Moodle is one of three LMSs my customer uses in support of our on-line course offerings for public high school students in New York state.  We offer hundreds of courses in our three platforms

1 - Moodle,
2 - APEX,
3 - Brainhoney (Buzz).

We purchase our course material from ten different vendors.  They are good courses, good content.

All of the courses could be delivered exclusively on-line, 100%.  I think our current customers are about 75% blended, 25% exclusively on line.

We have certified NYS teachers teaching, or should I say monitoring courses.  Courses often have mentors or proctors or coach's - you choose the work.  We en-role them in non-editing teacher roles, so they can actually grade things in the courses.  This is true with Moodle anyway, I am guessing the same type of granular role assignment are possible in the other LMSs.  This type of granular control is a strength of moodle.  The other LMSs may be a little easier to administer - teach from, but moodle is very feature rich and capable.  But, all that capability breeds ambiguity and cumbersome - ness.  Anyway - I digress.

This was the interesting thing that my customer said to a parent who was inquiring about our service.

 AccelerateU works with public schools across NY.  

The course is completely online. Students work at their own pace and communicate by email with their teacher. So students teach themselves the content, basically, with our teacher providing support.

As students make progress, we send many updates to the student, the school’s counselor, the parents, and others you would like to add. 

 Thank you.
 Mike 

To me, this was informative about the future direction of education.  More and more, courses will be offered exclusively on-line.  Teachers will interact with students in different ways, using methods different from the traditional classroom model.  I have said before that the emphasis tends to be on the administrator and reporting of the course, how easily can the teachers and admin get the data they need from it.  What are the scores, who is behind?  what is their grade?

I fear for the traditional value of "face to face" and focusing on the content and what is being learned.

Let me add one more thing.  I got this information from my wife this am, who is trying to help my youngest graduate with his two year degree by the end of next summer.  The interesting thing is the number of classes that are offered on-line only.  I'll summarize for you.  A lot of them were only being offered on-line during the January and summer time frame.  Interesting,