Implementation

Implementation is of paramount importance in blended learning. Reasoning Mind learned this lesson when one of the organization’s first programs was offered to teachers with very little training and support, leading to a year of seriously flawed program use. Subsequently, Reasoning Mind added extensive teacher training and implementation support, which addressed the problem. Implementation is important in any blended learning program, but is especially challenging for a program developed using instruction modeling: such programs by design involve a reform in the curriculum and instructional methods, and therefore can only succeed when teachers are given the support needed to make the change. One lesson learned is that the more instructionally comprehensive a blended learning program is, the more difficult it is for schools to adopt and implement it. This is a central problem for blended learning, since programs can only make a difference in proportion to their use. Thus, unless conditions are created (for example, through government policies) to make it easier for schools to use comprehensive programs, it is unrealistic to expect that blended learning will lead to meaningful educational improvements.