There are many new ideas in education today, in the early 21st century, and many of these ideas have the potential to shape education effectively for the future. Some of these ideas include Blended learning, the Flipped classroom, and certain forms of inductive learning. There are also long standing educational theories, such as Benjamin Blooms "Mastery Learning", and some other forms of inductive learning, that are still made use of in practice today. The problem is that these ideas need to be implemented in an effective way, a way designed to meet the needs of adolescent students of the early 21st century, in order to ensure their effectiveness.
Blended learning and flipped learning are good ideas in theory, but in practice the human element can contribute problems. Teachers need to find or make appropriate videos, find a way of making them available to students, and then find a way of holding students accountable for having watched and understood them. Students cannot be given any opportunity to fake their completion, or find a way to get through the videos without actually paying attention. This becomes more complicated when the teacher wants to incorporate ideas from mastery learning, and/or run their class as an inductive learning environment. Some popular examples of inductive learning environments include project based learning, problem based learning, and just in time teaching.
The purpose of this project was to build a website that students and teachers can log into, where teachers can build and provide video based lesson, their students can watch them and complete the lessons, and all of this can be kept track of, while that data maintains a high level of integrity.
The objectives of this project were met by creating a website which was eventually called thelearningblender.com. It was a SQL database driven dynamic website utilizing ASP.NET, Visual Basic, Javascript, and HTML. The website kept track of students and teachers logging in, grouped together by school. Grouping by school allowed students to stay logged in and switch between classes, and also allowed teachers to add students to their class without typing in all their information if they are already in the system at that given school.
Teachers were able to build lessons, uploading MP4 video files, and many formats of image files, for use in the lesson. Lessons were built as a series of pages with specific content, each page having a way of being completed successfully or unsuccessfully. To incorporate mastery learning, control was given to the teacher to direct the student user to a different given page, based on successful or unsuccessful completion of their current page. Video options were set up to allow the playing of only a specific clip within an overall video file. In an extra effort to ensure a quality learning experience and maintain integrity of student achievement, the teacher user was provided with the ability to disable fast forwarding, or skipping of the video. For questions, the teacher has the ability to set a timer on the answering of the question, making it automatically wrong when the timer runs out. To make this website work well for an inductive learning environment, optional pages were added that allow teachers to make prerequisite pages that simply check if another lesson has been completed, and allow the student user past that page when complete. Another type of page the teacher could create within a lesson is the checkpoint, which simply pauses the students progress until their teacher manually allows the student past the checkpoint.
Teachers have the ability to view all student information, progress filtered by lesson and period, and sorted by any column in the table, such as the student’s first name, last name, or lesson progress. Another page was created which gave teachers the ability to see every student who is waiting at a checkpoint, see what they need to do at that checkpoint, and move them past that checkpoint.
This project was built in its entirety using Microsoft Visual Studio, hand-coding files that are stored on a web server. It was created in the spare time of weekends by two people over the course of approximately three years prior to the writing of this paper. The two people involved were the teacher who possessed beginner/intermediate computer programming skills, and his friend who possessed advanced computer and web-programming skills. Making a project like this would be recommended for teachers who posess advanced web-programming skills, or know people who can help them with these skills. Teachers who would be users of the website from this project, thelearningblender.com, would need to have basic internet user skills, basic digital video editing and formatting skills, and it would be recommended that they have experience working with data in large tables or spreadsheets.
This project has been used by the teacher in his woodshop classroom with great success. Before having his lessons on thelearningblender.com, he was never sure on what level his students comprehended the information presented to them, and misunderstandings seemed very common. Upon implementation of thelearningblender.com, the teacher reported that students tried to claim they had done the required activities to do the next step of a project, but it was easy to see the students in question did not, which led the teacher to believe this practice was common among students leading up to the implementation of this website.
Students informally expressed a variety of reactions to having the website. Most of the high achieving students were glad to be able to work ahead at their own pace without being slowed down by other students, and the low achieving students were frustrated to finally be forced to pay attention. The teacher reported that the safety level maintained in the woodshop was raised significantly, and abuse/misuse of tools and equipment decreased.
Thelearningblender.com is ripe for expansion and further development. There are many features that will conceivably be added after the writing of this paper, which all factor in as appropriate and synergistic to a blended learning environment, on a classroom level as well as a school wide level. Some obvious tasks that follow the current state of the website is to allow teachers to export their lessons for use by other teachers, or being able to create and administer online tests. Another feature would be online games, accessible from the same menu structure as lessons in thelearningblender.com, and the ability to integrate achieving a certain score before achieving "successful completion." This way, reaching a certain level of achievement in one of the games can be a prerequisite in another lesson or game. Also, an RTI (response to intervention) scheduler could be added quite easily. With RTI, another period is added to the school day, at which time students are requested to come back to certain teacher’s classes to make up work. If there are five students each in four different periods who are all missing a certain assignment, the idea is that the teacher would request all twenty of those students to come back to make up that one specific assignment during the "RTI period." With thelearningblender.com’s SQL database of "students belonging to teachers belonging to schools" in place, RTI period student schedules and assignments could be seamlessly added to the websites features.
Although features could be added that allow this website to be used to provide purely online courses, that is not the intention, and is not supported by the research in this paper. This website will not be a social space for blogging or collaborating, as these things are already achieved in the classrooms where students and teachers are face to face. If online collaboration was to be utilized in the classroom, existing tools that the students would likely make use of in their futures should be used for those purposes, such as google docs, blogger.com, or padlet.com.
In the early 21st century, a quality learning management website which integrates mastery learning, blended, or flipped learning, and inductive learning, for use in a public face to face classroom setting, did not exist and was determined by one highschool woodshop teacher to be needed. Creation of the website, thelearningblender.com, ensued. Research was done, which validated the project in terms of the learning theories that supported it, which were behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. The research also informed the teacher of existing tools, and projects that have been done in areas related to blended learning, mastery learning, and inductive learning.
The website created, which was used for this project, is the learningblender.com. This website allows teachers to create online lessons, which play clips of video, ask questions that check for understanding, and send the student forward to new content, or back to remedial content, based on their successful or unsuccessful completion of each page. Teachers could view, filter, and sort student progress completion data a number of ways. There were many other features added to thelearningblender.com to provide the teacher with a more powerful blended learning environment experience, and special attention was given to provide tools that ensure that the students completing these lessons were paying attention.
The teacher who made this website found it to be very useful, and noticed better safety practices, and more appropriate tool use in his woodshop class. In order to create a website like this, an advanced knowledge of web-programming is required, as well as a web server with a database management system such as SQL server. For a teacher to use thelearningblender.com as a user, a more basic knowledge of the use of a computer is required.