Interview with Michael Horn, author of the book “Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools”

(Book image from http://www.christenseninstitute.org)

AJE Managing Editor Bryan Mann recently interviewed Michael Horn, co-author of the book Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools.  You can download the full mp3 file by clicking here or you can access the full audio through this website by clicking on the play button below:

Full transcript:

Mann: Michael Horn is the co-founder and executive director of education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. He is also the co-author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, and he has written a recurring column in Forbes and has writing in the Washington Post, The Economist, Huffington Post, and in Education Week. It is my pleasure that he is joining me today, and today we will be discussing the book Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools.

Michael, thank you for joining me, my first question to you is: Can you just talk about the book a little bit, reminding us what blended learning is and what types of K-12 blended learning models are out there?

Horn: Yeah, sure thing Bryan and thanks again for having me and doing this interview. It really came out as a sequel in many ways to Disrupting Class which came out in 2008, which observed that online learning was growing very rapidly as what we would call a “disruptive innovation” in the education world in general. I think it has been relatively well known in higher education, but certainly it’s happening in K-12 education as well. Since Disrupting Class came out that growth accelerated in some key ways, but really blending the online learning into brick and mortar schools themselves. So starting in 2010, my co-author, Heather Staker, and I – with her taking the lead on some of this research – really started looking out in the field talking to about 100 to 150 different educators who were doing what people were calling “blended learning.” [We wanted] to derive a definition, a common definition that everyone could agree to in the field. What we came out with was really that blended learning is a combination of online learning where students have some control over the time, place, path, or pace of learning and it has to take place in part at a brick and mortar school with teachers, and then thirdly the modalities along each student’s learning path has to be connected somehow. In other words, what you do offline has to somehow connect to that online experience that you’re having as well – they can’t be two totally different things going on, otherwise there’s no blend.

So that’s the definition of blended learning that we derived and then really what we noticed was that actually blended learning looked incredibly different in different places, not just around the country but even within districts or even within the schools. And so we started to work on coming up with a taxonomy just to describe the different ways we were seeing it unfold, not to be judgmental about them and say one is good or one is bad, but just to give people, educators on the ground really a shorthand language to say, “Yeah I am basically doing this type of model,” and then it would mean something to someone so they could sort of visualize what was going on.

And so the four basic types of models we see are we see “rotation models” where students are rotating between different activities, one of which is online learning, at fixed points in time. The most common of those is a station rotation within a classroom which is very similar to a center-based learning model that existed in elementary schools for decades now. A second type of model we see is what we call a “flex model” where the online learning now is really the backbone of the student’s experience, but they’re moving flexibly through different activities whether those are online or offline activities. A third one is what we call the “a la carte” model, but it in essences students are taking one, two, maybe three online courses where the teacher is actually online him or herself. And then the last category is what we call the “enriched virtual” and this really stemmed from a lot of the fulltime virtual schools that a lot of people have seen coming up for a number of years and basically a lot of those schools found, “you know, we need a brick and mortar school-based element of this to help students out a little bit more, give them a little bit more support and so they started adding required school days, one, two, three days a week perhaps in the enriched virtual formats.

Mann: In the book there is a great deal of discussion about concepts related to innovation theory and how to use this theory to help guide the direction of blended learning and these different models. Can you just describe disruptive and sustaining innovations and talk about how they relate to the different models you just mentioned?

Horn: Yeah, sure thing. So at a high level and outside of education for a moment, disruptive innovations refer to these innovations that come along every once in a while, not that frequently but every once in a while, that as judged by the traditional metrics of performance actually don’t look all that great, but they enable a whole new group of people to have access to a service that previously only people with expertise or wealth had had. And because this new innovation is simpler, it’s more convenient, it’s more affordable, accessible, decentralized – something around those sorts of dimensions – and over time the disruptive innovation improves predictably, driven by the improvement of technology, such that over time people migrate out to this disruptive innovation and it comes to replace the dominant way we’ve always done things.

Now sustaining innovation plays a really important part in this world, which is that for the existing paradigm if you will, the existing classrooms in this case, sustaining innovations are basically the year to year or even day to day improvements that those entities are making to do what they already do, but do it better. So when we looked at education more specifically, and let me say this clearly because I think a lot of people read Disrupting Class and took away from it, “oh, disruptive innovation equals good and sustaining innovation equals bad therefore everything we do we’ll call disruptive” and I just think that’s a big unfortunate byproduct that, I hope we didn’t mislead people into thinking that because there are sustaining innovations that are absolutely critical. But the way it manifests itself in education is that what we see traditional classrooms are adopting online learning as a sustaining innovation, what we call a hybrid, the best of both worlds, to become better. They still have seat time and do more with less in some cases and things like that. And then we see this whole range of disruptive models like the flex, enriched virtual, a la carte, and they basically do away with the traditional classroom altogether and start with the online learning and then they seem to be snapping in brick and mortar components to help them improve over time.

Our observation was just simply in the book was that since disruptive models over come tend to replace the existing models, that over time we’d probably expect in high schools in particular, maybe middle schools, that the disruptive models of blended learning will come to replace the traditional classrooms that we have today. We don’t know what time horizon that will occur over, but the theory allows us to predict that over the next several decades that’s probably the trajectory we’re on.

Mann: One thing that caught my eye was that you kind of look at sustaining innovation and you think “oh, hybrid, blended, in place and online, this must be a sustaining” and then you talk about how, “no, no there are models out there that are disruptive” can you kind of expand on that a little bit and talk about which ones may be disruptive and which ones may be sustaining? 

Horn: Yeah, it’s an insightful question. So let me just affirm your original instinct also, which is that I think one of the big things that we sort of discovered in the writing of this book and our research over the last couple of years is that really, and we sort of knew it when we wrote Disrupting Class but maybe not as explicitly as we should have, when we are talking about disruptive innovation in K-12 education we’re not talking about the disruption of schools. Schools, districts, those entities will still be here many decades from now, the theory would predict at the moment.

Basically, all the blended learning that we are talking about occurring is a sustaining innovation or is a hybrid to schools, but the big observation was that the disruption was happening at the classroom level within schools. In those realms you certainly see some hybrid where that traditional classroom is grabbing onto online learning to do better, and those hybrid models are the station rotation, like I mentioned, it keeps the classroom but adds a center, the lab rotation keeps that classroom but students rotate out to an online activity, and then the flipped classroom which actually has the word classroom in it which helps us identify it as a hybrid model, but then those disruptive models to the traditional classroom are really that individual rotation, the flex, a la carte, and enriched virtual and those often there might be like three or four classrooms, knock down the walls between them and combine them into this big open learning space, sometimes they much more resemble store fronts in shopping malls, and they look like work places that you might see in the modern office – they don’t really look like a classroom. So basically the student experience is almost mediated if you will from the online platform, with a teacher of course, but sort of the experience starts there and to get better to better serve students the online learning is basically saying, “oh we need to actually bring in brick and mortar elements.”

We have this example in the book where some of the people out there might be familiar with the retailer Bonobos, which is a men’s clothing apparel retailer. Bonobos they started as an exclusively online retailer and they said, “We’ll never have brick and mortar stores” and then about, I don’t know I think about six years into their existence, all of a sudden you started seeing Bonobo show rooms, they start to pop up around cities in the country and you said, “Whoa what are they doing?” Well, it turns out – I’ve gone to a couple of these now – they don’t have any inventory in these stores. They’re not classic stores as you’d understand them, they’re just places where you can try on the clothes and get your size figured out, look at different colors in person, and then you still buy it online. I think the emergence of the disruptive models of blended learning looks a lot like that. You have these online learning [programs] that have been coming up at least as far back as the Florida Virtual School in 1997, but they’re starting to snap in brick and mortar components that look fundamentally different from a traditional classroom to be able to serve students who quite frankly need other students around them or adults, peers, teachers and a safe place to learn –all of those supports that schools are really good at providing and for which, well quite frankly there are only a few students who can learn at home fulltime in our society – that’s not a mass reality for most students.

Mann: So let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about what you see as the benefits of these programs. In the book you mention that blended learning enables personalization, it increases access to courses, and it helps control costs. Can you expand on that and talk about how blended learning accomplishes these goals?

Horn: Yeah, absolutely. And I should say upfront that my impression is that that’s the driving reason for the adoption in the field, but just because someone has adopted blended learning doesn’t mean it’s good and it doesn’t mean that it is accomplishing all three or maybe even any one.

For the personalization, by the nature of the software that we are starting to see it allows each individual to have much more control over certainly their time of learning. They can log on at night, they can watch a lecture, play a game, do a simulation, work on their project, they can have much more control over their pace of learning – they can speed up, slow down if they don’t understand something, repeat something, whereas they aren’t tethered to the classroom pace that they traditionally were. They have much more control over the pathway of their learning as well and we are starting to see the rise of playlists in online learning where students have ten different ways to learn a particular topic or maybe they won’t follow the course sequentially, for them it makes more sense for them to go a different way through the material. So we are starting to see a lot more personalization around those dimensions. Those are some of the things that blended learning very inherently starts to enable.

In terms of the access and equity, I think you said it yourself, right. There’s lots, millions quite frankly, of students in schools across America they don’t have access to particular courses they may need or want for their futures and now you can deliver an online experience and access to a high quality teacher almost regardless of where someone lives, particularly as the infrastructure and broadband connectivity gets better and better.

Then in terms of the cost control, the way I’ve been thinking about it is, well people love to ask, “Is blended learning cheaper than traditional” and I think the answer is, as with many things in life, is well it depends. If you put eight students in a room with a teacher and computers it probably is going to be a heck of a lot more expensive. If you put 30 students it might be cheaper. It sort of depends on how you implement it, but what we are seeing is that blended learning is enabling these benefits of personalization and access and equity to be extended at a cost that does not break the bank. In other words, in the past, for example, if you wanted to do personalization you really needed almost a tutor for every single child and that just happens to be really, really expensive and prohibitively so. Now you can start to do these things, right, and that’s sort of how I think about the cost control element. I guess the second part of it is that you saw a lot of budget cuts and tight budgets, particularly in places like California over the last several years, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that basically every single charter school there has moved towards blended learning out of tighter budgets where they might have to have slightly higher class sizes and things if that nature.

Mann: Do you have any examples that you can point to that you see as best practices for accomplishing some of these goals. You talked about some poor implementation may not accomplish these goals, you give a lot of great examples in the book can you give the audience maybe an example or two about good ways that schools are accomplishing these goals?

Horn: Certainly.  So I think – and I’ll probably end up if we do examples repeating some of these – but for personalization Summit Public Schools, it’s a charter school network in California, they’ve done a really good job of creating playlists for students whereby there’s roughly ten different ways to learn each concept, students have a high degree ability to personalize the learning for their particular needs, and a large degree of control over that time element as well. They devote 16 hours a week to personalized learning time for students where they can really log on and follow their own pathway. Then every Friday these students are meeting with mentors who are teachers assigned to them as mentors to really chart out their individual learning goals for that week ahead, figure out what they want to master, how they are going to do it, how they are going to allocate time, and so forth. So that’s a pretty exciting, I think, example of a personalization track.

On the access and equity, gosh, you’re seeing a lot of interesting ones pop up particularly in rural schools. In the book we talk about in Alabama how they set up what’s called access and online virtual learning school to offer courses to students particularly in rural Alabama that just didn’t have access to AP courses and things of that nature. They started to see AP test numbers tick up both in terms of access as well as scores themselves because many, many more students had access to these experiences than before when they lived in these schools where they didn’t have the bandwidth or the access to teachers to be able to offer these sorts of experiences.

In terms of the cost control, one of the stories that we tell in the book is around KIPP Empower, a school in Los Angeles, California that was going to open with a low student-to-teacher ratio model under the idea that small group instruction would be key to their academic success, and literally right before they opened, a few months beforehand, they got the news that based on budget cuts within the state they would not be able to have one of the teachers that they had counted on and so therefore they were going to have to have higher class sizes – roughly 30-to-1 class sizes. So they basically realized that if they could implement a Station Rotation Model 10 students at a time could be working on computers, 10 students on groups doing collaborative projects, and then 10 students basically on the rug in small group instruction with the teachers so that they could preserve that small group part of their instructional model, which was so important to them, but do so in the confines of greatly reduced revenue.

Mann: One critique I’ve heard about blended learning or online learning in particular is that people say that they might not be suitable for certain academic subjects. Can you just talk about, I mean you mentioned groups on the carpet and things like that, can you talk about how a blended school can design a program where they still have subjects like art and music and things that might not be suitable to be learning on a computer screen?

Horn:  Yeah, absolutely and I’m glad you asked this because you do hear that a lot and it ranges from some people saying, “Well it is great for math but not for social studies” right, and then it goes to, “Oh, I see how it can work on social studies” because the teacher can facilitate really interesting conversations and you can do all sorts of simulations and explorations of what it was like to live in the past. You see Florida Virtual School’s “Conspiracy Code for American History” and things like that and you start to stretch your mind about what this could look like. Then people say, “Well, music, arts, it won’t work for that.” So I think there are two responses. One is one of things I think blended learning will do is allow us to almost commoditize the delivery of core academic instruction to allow schools to free up resources to actually pay attention to those things that you can really only do in a place-based way, which may be around sports or arts or certain orchestral activities – things like that, right. So if it frees up resources to continue to devote to those things, I think that’s a great thing because over the last 10 to 15 years we’ve seen way too many schools cut those sorts of programs that are critical for developing students into great citizens and people.

The second thing, though, is I think blended learning can actually help with those things and one of the things we are seeing is Holton-Arms, for example, in Washington, DC actually uses blended learning for its music instruction. What they’ve found is that there is software out there that is far more patient with a student than any teacher at helping them practice their music and identifying wrong notes or when their maybe out of rhythm, or the pitch is just slightly off if you’re playing a wind instrument for example, and it can immediately give you feedback not just once a week when you have a lesson or not just when the conductor in your orchestra class happened to hear you. I can tell you as someone who has conducted orchestras, there’s 50 people out there so you may or may not get to every single one in the course of a week or let alone a month.  These sorts of things can actually give you the core instruction to accelerate and then you can go in with your fellow peers and have maybe the more group experience of putting something together in a band or orchestra type setting, and of course we are seeing with Skype orchestras and Youtube orchestras and things like that actually you can do these things virtually as well. This is really interesting if you live in a community where maybe there is not enough people to field a full orchestra. I know less about art, but obviously lots of art is now done on the computer so I suspect that there’s similar things being done and the ability to bring in high quality instructors, and not just instructors but, quite frankly, experts from the working world of art to give real-time student feedback on your projects or helping you understand, “Gee, you are really good at this, these are careers that might be open to you” – a lot of creativity I think can go into designing these experiences with online learning technology.

Mann: Let’s talk a little bit more about the students. There’s an extended section in your book about student motivation, or at least there’s a chapter or two. Can you talk about how you see blended learning as being a motivating factor for students and the role blended learning has in motivating students to come to school and engage?

Horn:  Yeah, absolutely. So I think we have a different perspective from a lot of researchers who have studied motivation, which is to say that, well a lot of people would say that some students are motivated and others are unmotivated. Indeed, if you talk to parents or teachers you’ll hear the same sort of language. Our sense is that all students are motivated, but they are not necessarily motivated by school. They are motivated to feel successful and make progress in their lives, they are motivated by things like having fun with friends and so the question is understanding what motivates them.  How do we create school to get their jobs done, in effect, but also get society’s jobs done for school as well? [These are] around instilling core knowledge, skills, and dispositions and so forth. Our sense is that blended learning actually opens up lots of more opportunities for this, particularly in the two I mentioned, both being successful and making progress every day as well as the opportunity to have fun with friends. Briefly, one of the key findings is that our current schools are actually terrible at the success job because the opportunities to show that you are successful only occur every few weeks when there is a test that arises, and when the test comes up it’s actually often designed in a way to make most students feel like failures because it’s graded on a curve such that by definition a lot of students will not pass or will get less than satisfactory grades. Then they move onto the next unit regardless of how they did and may fall further and further behind and so forth.

The thing about blended learning is that it can start to bring in what I would call competency-based learning where students move on upon mastery of a given subject or skill and therefore you are constantly delivering learning just above the students’ current level – not too high that they get frustrated and feel failure and not too low that it’s so easy that they have no sense of meaning. The second part on having fun with friends is that it can free up a whole lot of time for much more positive peer interactions because it can allow teachers to start to facilitate Socratic group discussions, project-based learning and things of that nature that have previously been difficult for teachers to do in a meaningful way because they have sort have been pulled between delivering a lesson plan and giving core instruction in accordance with the calendar and curriculum required, but also knowing that these other things are equally important to be able to deliver for students across Bloom’s taxonomy, if you will. So I think blended learning starts to break these tradeoffs in many ways.

I will tell you one other thing that was surprising to me when I’ve gone to blended learning schools. I was worried in many ways that I would just see lots of students clicking mindlessly away on computers and not having much interaction and sort of being an uninspiring of an environment.  The good ones that I have gone into, that’s actually not what is happening.   Sure, they may be spending time on computers working through it, but then you start to see students all of a sudden pop up from their desks and walk over to either their friend or one of their peers next to them or across the room and start to say “oh yeah, I struggled with that last week and the way I figured it out was…” and they start teaching each other. And so, my memory of what, say, middle school was like was that a lot of our peer interactions were to get around the teacher and to avoid academics, to pass notes in class, to break pencils, things of that nature – all of a sudden you have an environment that by changing sort of the purpose, right, we’re all trying to get ahead in our learning wherever we are and we know that sometimes you’ll move faster than I will and sometimes I’ll move faster than you will. It all of a sudden creates a much more positive experience where people are bouncing off of each other to help each other with the academics and it sort of created a team-like game environment where everyone is trying to get in on the fun together. That’s a very different experience from a traditional classroom.

Mann: What about, well a lot of education research now is dedicated to urban school districts and places where students live in extreme circumstances and have difficulty learning because of a lot of barriers from their home life, how do you see blended learning as helpful or useful for those types of students who need even more resources and human interaction and things like that?

Horn: Yeah, so I think two things. One, again a lot of those students come in with huge skill and knowledge deficits right from the beginning, whether it’s the number of words that they’ve heard and therefore their aptitude for picking up language and math and things of that nature and blended learning is great because it can tailor to their actual level so it can build in those core knowledge and skills to give them the foundation to progress into more challenging and advanced concepts without building in them that failure of “I’m not good enough for math” or something like that. I think that’s something we often miss as we say, “Well, the curriculum says it’s September 30^th and therefore we ought to be doing this concept because we have to deliver it” but the reality is if the student doesn’t have the foundation for that experience then there is a very low likelihood that they will understand, or master, or be successful, and it would just push them further and further behind.  So I think that’s one.

The second thing is these students also, as you noted, come in with a whole range of health challenges often, or family structure issues, or counseling needs, things like that. My sense again is if blended learning can commoditize some of the pure content and instruction delivery, it can free up both resources and teacher time and allow for team teaching environments even maybe where there’s a whole team of people there designed to support students along all these non-academic reasons that they may struggle and spend much more time and energy on those things that really need to be done locally and in a much higher touch way. If you talk to teachers in blended learning environments, that’s what they typically say, that they get to know their students far, far better and they have far more time to work with them one on one or in small groups. So, you are basically freeing up that time to work on all of those things that are so challenging for some of these students in these urban environments. So that’s how I think, maybe not a direct way, but I think by freeing up resources and time it is actually quite powerful what it could do.

Mann: Yeah, let’s talk about the teacher a little bit. You mentioned their shifting role in the book. Can you describe what you see the role of a teacher is or a good teacher in a blended setting, what that looks like?

Horn: Yeah, so this was actually one of our favorite chapters in the book. Heather really, really got excited about this chapter because there is sort of this nasty refrain, if you will, when technology in education comes up where people say, “Oh you just want technology for teachers” and I think people who are serious about this work don’t think that way, they know that teachers are absolutely critical to student success and really this is a tool that can help them. What I think we are seeing is that it does change the role of teachers however. They don’t have to deliver lesson plans to an entire class, they may not have to do any lecturing, it depends right, and it can allow them to spend a lot more time on mentorship, facilitation of discussions, project-based learning, evaluating student work – particularly the more complex things for which computers are not particularly well-suited to do at this point in time – and things of that nature.

So to answer your question, I think it is difficult to say this is the way that teachers will look at the future, what we’re seeing is that depending on the type of model that you put into place, and a bunch of the design decisions that you make along that road, you will have different job descriptions for your teachers. I think that’s one of the real challenging things right now, that despite efforts to sort of codify the competencies that teachers need to be successful in these environments, the reality is that a teacher who is teaching in a lab rotation in Milpitas School District in California is very different from the skill set needed by a teacher teaching in Quakertown Public Schools in Pennsylvania right now in a blended learning environment because they are just doing very different things.

I think some of the opportunities there is for team teaching, specialization in the areas that you really like as a teacher and are really strong in. One concrete example is that data is going to be much more important and much easier to access hopefully in the future with blended learning, with the amount of information we’ll understand about how students are doing with the frequent assessments online. Some teachers, I’m quite certain, are not going to be excited to be digging into the data to figure out “what I should do for a given student,” whereas other teachers I think are going to be thrilled to just geek out on the data and dive deep and figure out “how do I construct out an individualized learning plan for this child,” but they might not be so excited about actually working alongside that child as the individualized learning plan is given through certain activities. Fortunately, there will be another teacher who didn’t like that data who is really excited about small group or individual tutoring work. So I think these are some of the ways we can imagine the role changing, but I still think it is very early and different places will likely do different things. But hopefully this gives people out there a sense of just the plurality of roles and creativity that I think we will see in the future for the role of the teacher.

Mann: Now in your experience with different blended learning schools, I’m sure you’ve had a chance to talk to teachers, what are some of the things that they’ve said? Have you seen some kind of push back or resistance or have you seen a very receptive group of people toward these programs? Do they see it as helpful for their job? What kind of things have you talked to teachers about on the ground?

Horn: Yeah, gosh that’s a good question. So I think you hear a few things when teachers move into blended environments. One is “Compared to the old environment I know way more about my students and I am able to reach individuals in ways I never imagined I would, I can’t imagine going back to before this. So I am more satisfied by it in many ways with my job.” You also hear however, “My job is more difficult than it was before because I could just deliver the lesson and I knew a certain percentage wouldn’t get it right, but holy cow, now that I can see all this data and see how different students are doing and how much more I could be doing, oh my gosh there’s like limitless work.” So it’s actually really hard, right. The third thing that I hear a lot of is, “My preparation and professional development did not prepare me for this new job. Like 5% of what I learned maybe in my teacher education program is for maybe 95% of what I now do and 95% of sort of what I learned is maybe for 5% of what I now do.”So you can question teacher education more generally I think around the country, but blended learning really changes the game and I think teachers feel a justifiable sense of frustration around that and it puts pressure on schools of education to catch up if you will. But I think these are the three most common refrains I hear, so it’s positive but it is tough and “gosh, how do we prepare.”

Actually, let me say one other thing, which is six months in often, so teachers will really struggle for those six months and talk about how they don’t have the PD and preparation and so forth for it. Teachers are smarter than often society gives them credit for and almost invariably that start to figure it out. So they start to say, “Gee I don’t need to do more than this, I need to do more than that.” So I would say that while, as a education sector, we are not filling in those gaps adequately yet, but teachers are figuring it out and hacking their way to making it work better and better and getting smarter and smarter about what they do over time. So one of the things I think we can do as a community, sort of in the broad sense of that word, is give teachers more and more opportunities to talk with other teachers at other schools who are doing blended learning and just trade secrets of the trade if you will while we sort of figure out the best way to actually construct education programs for these new roles.

Mann: Ok, so we have just a few minutes left so maybe we should shift a little bit to talk about implementation. So how do you kind of recommend for a school their implementation strategy so that teachers do have the time and the implementation does go smoothly?

Horn: Yeah, yeah. Well it’s a critical thing and I think we have seen where Smartboards or other devices have been foisted upon teachers and just created more time without sort of giving them the better teaching that they desired for their students. So our recommendations in the book is not a best practices way of just adopting blended learning or something like that. It is more to say that each place is going to be different and what you need for your students is going to be different. So here’s a design guide for walking you through how you setup a blended learning environment to match what you want it to be and do. And so the first part of that is to start with, why are you doing this? What’s the rallying cry, your reason, for looking for this innovation? So we ask you to think about: What problems are you trying to solve, goals are you trying to achieve? And then really state how you would know that you’ve been successful by making that goal very concrete in numerical terms so that everyone in the building knows whether, you know, two years from now you’ve been successful and also as a way to calibrate yourself over time.

The next step is to really build a team, bring a team to the table to help you solve that problem and design a solution. And then we say basically start with the student experience, map out the ideal that you want – map out the ideal teacher experience you want, and then start putting the rubber to the road by figuring out the content, hardware, broadband infrastructure, classroom or school design, to match those sorts of experiences, right, and then hopefully – in chapter 8 of the book – we give what is hopefully an easy checklist. That is to say, based on the decisions you have made here this is probably the instructional model that you are going to put into place. We are making that free on blendedlearning.org as well, that part of the book. From there, really be intentional about the culture that you build as you start to implement that design and do it in a humble way. Start small, we call it discovery-driven planning, but really be able to identify the big assumptions that you are making and iterate accordingly so you don’t go out with a, say $1 billion initiative from the get go and then find out a couple months in that your assumptions were wildly off and you have some sort of spectacular failure that drives press headlines.

Mann:  You know, in the beginning of the book where sailing companies wrote off steam ships at first and then they were disrupted and then they were gone. How do we know that blended learning is the steam ship, if you will, and not something like the Smartboard and the mini-disc player? You know, fall flat in the market. What evidence do we have for that?

Horn: Yeah, I think, we should say, again, with humility, we don’t know for sure. I think what the theory suggests is that what’s different about online learning here is a few fold. One, it really is following this pattern of disruptive innovation much as the steam ship did as it started in these areas, with the what we call non-consumption where the alternative was really nothing because it was so primitive at first.  Then it has been getting better and better and better over time and then growing accordingly as it improves. That’s fundamentally different from a lot of these things.

The second thing is that it is not just about the technology when you see disruption. It is really about putting a model around it that is coherent and can improve itself. So in many ways a Smartboard is a thing, but it’s not an instructional model as far as school goes. Where online learning, or blended learning, is really, it’s not just about the technology because you can use mobile, you can use computers, there’s lots of things you can use, but it is really about the model itself around this core technology. So that’s fundamentally different.

So the third thing I think is, what is different I would say from this, compared to say TV broadcast learning or radio broadcast learning in the past, or even CD-ROMs quite frankly, is the interactive nature of it – the ability both to interact with teachers and students around the world, but also for the computer program itself to learn and get better over time because data is being exchanged in both ways. While I would be the first to tell you that the software out there on the market is not doing this enough yet, the opportunity to learn from what is and isn’t working on the ground, and improve accordingly based on that feedback, is quite tremendous in this realm.

Mann: Yeah, and it’s interesting, you point out in the book that some of the software that does it the best like Khan Academy is the cheapest. So that’s something that I find interesting and useful, and hopeful too if this is something that we really want. I know you mention that schools if they want the best in the beginning sometimes they have to pay a lot of money to get some of these great features, and then you go on to say that the Khan Academy is one of the better ones and it is free, so.

Horn: Yeah, you couldn’t have pointed to Khan Academy five years ago and thought, well it was around, but you couldn’t have pointed to it and said that gee that is going to change the face of the world. Look at how much better it is and I think that with the analytics, and data in assessment that they’re building, not to say that they will be a winning solution per se, but I think that they have a good chance. They are emblematic of what else I think is coming on down the pipeline.

Mann: Ok, so those are pretty much all the questions that I had. Do you have any final thoughts or final words that you want to add before we finish our conversation?

Horn: Well, I think the mark of a good interview is there were good questions and hopefully the answers kept pace. So I think on that score you certainly aced this one. I appreciate the thoughtful questions. I think that’s the most important thing and I think even honestly just to tie it back into the book and the topic, I think as people are going through the process in designing these environments, asking questions, being cynical, and then coming up with solutions out of these questions is a really critical part. In many ways the adoption of blended learning mirrors the lifelong learning process and appetite that we hope to instill in all of our students.

Mann: Great. All right, well thank you Michael. Again the book is Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools. This interview was with Michael Horn and the other author who could not make it today with us was Heather Staker. Yeah, I encourage everyone to check out the book. It is a really good read and it captures some really important innovative ideas for the future of education. Thanks a lot Michael.

Horn: Thank you.