Back on Sunday, September 16, I sent a link to a video (See video below) asking what folks thought about the approach of Carpe Diem Charter School in Arizona. They designed a school from the ground up based on a blended-learning approach. One of their strategies was to put technology first, and they seem to have some pretty good results.

Then on Saturday NBC Nightly News aired a report on this same school. There is now an entire site dedicated to the school on the Education Nation website too. http://www.educationnation.com/casestudies/carpediem/

This added press got me to think more about what this school is doing.

• If self-paced video and online labs help the students at Carpe Diem, might they help our students?
• If students are intimidated to ask questions, might they benefit from self-paced video and online labs?
• If students are motivated by earning points, badges, and seeing visual indicators of their learning progress, might self-paced video and online labs help them succeed?
• If we could watch students’ success as they complete self-paced video and online labs could we better identify how to help these students?

What if we offered classes where a significant portion of the class was “lab time” where students could come in and leverage self-paced exercises in a computer lab style environment with a teacher’s assistant present? If students were sick or needed extra time they could get access to the same lab exercises online. That could then be coupled with instructor time where those concepts could be re-enforced and more personal conversations could happen. We could take this one step further and complement the courses with an “Open Study” style collaborative study group. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.