style="font-size:15px;"> Lisa Reason, PhD, has been teaching and designing digital graduate curricula for over twelve years. She has successfully led the development and design of numerous masters and doctoral programs and is widely recognized as an expert in online learning. Lisa was the recipient of a doctoral honorarium in 2011 for distinguished faculty and outstanding instructional practice by Grand Canyon University. She was also the recipient of four separate honorariums from Capella University for excellence in scholarship and significant contributions to professional practice. Lisa has been a featured presenter at several scholarly and practitioner-based conferences and has chaired numerous dissertations and research initiatives on topics related to digital learning, instructional practice, leadership, and school reform. Lisa resides in Scottsdale, Arizona, with her twin son Brice and Kiah.
To learn more about Lisa’s work, follow @LisaReason1 on Twitter.
Crystal Guiler, as a facilitator, coach, district administrator, curriculum specialist, lead curriculum developer, instructional designer, and virtual learning project manager, has been a leader in K–12 digital learning for over ten years. Crystal has worked extensively with Florida Virtual School, the largest provider of K–12 digital education in the United States. She has developed over seventy higher education and K–12 digital courses and has supervised the development of hundreds of additional digital training solutions.
To book Casey Reason, Lisa Reason, or Crystal Guiler for professional development, contact [email protected].
INTRODUCTION
Tools and the Master Craftsman
We wrote this book to help educators enhance student learning in the digital age. We recognize that the technology tools that teachers have at their fingertips today are transformational; however, let’s be clear, it’s not about the new tools. It never will be. It’s about teachers finding and choosing new tools, and then learning to skillfully use them. When the teacher learns to use these tools, the tools then become an expression of his or her teaching craft. Over time, the teacher transforms his or her approach to supporting the learning process.
We chose the title Creating the Anywhere, Anytime Classroom because, over the last several years, it has become clear to us that distance learning approaches have created viable alternatives to many traditional classrooms. Perhaps even more important is that we realize the benefits and opportunities associated with distance learning for transforming the traditional classroom in dynamic ways. Indeed, the master craftsmen who are teaching our students today have the tools to create viable learning experiences anywhere and anytime. To help put these amorphous new learning opportunities in context, let’s examine what we mean by traditional learning, online learning, and blended learning.
Traditional Learning, Online Learning, and Blended Learning—A Monstrous Mash
There are some simple definitions that will help you understand the similarities and differences between the following instructional archetypes.
■ Traditional learning: For the purposes of this book, traditional learning refers to flesh-and-bone, face-to-face teaching and learning experiences that most of us grew up with in K–12 education. They are synchronous in that everyone has to be in the same room at the same time to make the learning experience happen for everyone (Al-Qahtani & Higgins, 2012).
■ Online learning: Online learning refers to learning experiences that are hosted on a digital platform (Al-Qahtani & Higgins, 2012). If you attend Stanford Online High School (https://ohs.stanford.edu), all of your classes are hosted in a digital platform. Much of your interaction is asynchronous, meaning that interactions don’t have to occur all at the same place or at the same time. The teacher posts content, video lectures, and so on, and learners engage with one another in asynchronous, threaded discussion questions. This high school also has synchronous meetings wherein teachers and students all connect on Skype at an agreed-on time each day and hold class, with the teachers leading synchronous conversations and activities. The differentiator is that the learning experiences are online.
■ Blended learning: A blended learning approach is one wherein teachers deliver instruction in a traditional setting with ongoing, robust learning opportunities simultaneously taking place, with the same group of students, in a digital, online environment. Stanford Online High School holds weeklong, in-person seminars throughout the year. Although the main element of instruction is delivered online, technically the inclusion of these face-to-face learning opportunities makes it a blended learning experience (Picciano & Seaman, 2009).
As you think about your own teaching and learning situation you may recognize that the lines between traditional and online learning are increasingly blurry. Many traditional classrooms today have established parallel, digital learning spaces that allow teachers to post content, stay connected, ask questions, and even create a dialogue with students. The significant advancements in video capacity allow even the most asynchronous digital learning experiences to use a camera to make a personal connection and host an online learning event.
What does this mean for teachers? What does it mean for the profession? In a word—opportunity! The strategies we discuss in this book are designed to meet this wonderfully exciting, amorphous mash of opportunity at our fingertips, and to learn to better understand and harness this amazing power. To do so, we use this book to put these opportunities into an appropriate context. Let’s begin by defining digitally enhanced learning.
Digitally Enhanced Learning
There has been quite an evolution in the verbiage educators and students use regarding digital learning. Unfortunately, many of the past phrases don’t help us to ascend to our highest aspirations. The phrase teaching online speaks to the actions of the instructor and references a ubiquitous teaching platform. Distance learning is a phrase that correctly puts the focus on learning, but by emphasizing the word distance, it suggests that this is a method of learning that exists only as a simple, convenient alternative to traditional live classroom instruction. It also has the side effect of leaving blended classrooms out of the equation.
Digital learning, an increasingly accepted term in the teaching community, represents the strategic application of an endless array of technological tools to support the learning process (Selwyn, 2011). This could include online platforms, apps, and other web-based assets (Kong et al., 2014). Note that although there are assistive digital tools, including a variety of learning apps, designed to function offline in a physical classroom, in this book we focus specifically on digital tools that help facilitate learning while online.
Throughout this book, we use the term digitally enhanced learning (DEL) to describe the strategic use of digital tools and various virtual learning platforms to support and enhance the online learning process. We use this term in our work because we need to take this evolution in our thinking about the online learning process one step further. Digitizing the learning experience is of little value if educators aren’t first and foremost using digital tools to pursue significant pedagogical advancements. Some well-intended technophiles salivate over the latest innovation online, or on their smartphones, without focusing on the added effectiveness they intend to create. This is like handing a gardener a better shovel and focusing on the shovel rather than how it helps the gardener make the garden flourish. Focusing on that flourishing garden of using digital technology to enhance the online learning of K–12 students is the true intention of this book. To help flesh out what DEL is all about, let’s address some essential observations
