Blended Learning – a disruptive innovation?

I came across the impressive infographic below about Blended Learning from edudemic. It’s interesting that Blended Learning has been characterized as a disruptive innovation. I feel this is not an accurate characterization. Disruptive innovations create some initial chaos and “destruction”, likely with some older technology being replaced, hence the word disruptive. For example, after the iPhone came out, feature phones from Nokia were pummeled into near oblivion and the touch screen interface replaced the qwerty keyboard interface. This has resulted in a restructuring of the telecommunications market and Nokia and Blackberry have retrenched large numbers of staff.

Blended learning has not really replaced anything neither has it caused any huge upheaval. As far as I know, no school or university has ordered retrenchment of staff because of Blended Learning. What has happened has been a gradual embrace by existing educators and school leaders. The current popular incarnation is Flipped Learning and I just attended a talk by a colleague who teaches Physics on how he uses videos to present his tutorial answers, thus freeing up class time for more experimentation. The sense I get about Blended Learning and Flipped Learning is actually more about normalisation than disruption.

I first encountered the term “normalisation” while reading Stephen Bax’s articles. He argues that we should avoid making education technology a “fetish” but instead aim towards “normalisation”, where paedogogy and technology are used in a natural seamless way. Blended learning has gradually become a standard feature in many universities these days where students can access readings, video content, assignment materials and collaborate via forums or instant messaging. It’s pretty seamless, you download your readings, read up prior to the lecture, attend the lecture in which the lecturer will announce next week’s assignments, you complete your assignment and upload online or post your comments in the forum if the assignment is about posting your thoughts and so on. So it seems to me that Blended Learning is increasingly being normalised and that is a good thing cause it’s a slow and stable process in which both students and teachers can keep up.

So 3 cheers for Blended Learning – a normalised innovation!