{"id":5532,"date":"2017-05-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/whats-the-difference-between-blended-and-personalized-learning\/"},"modified":"2020-02-27T16:47:26","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T21:47:26","slug":"whats-the-difference-between-blended-and-personalized-learning","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/whats-the-difference-between-blended-and-personalized-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s the Difference Between Blended and Personalized Learning?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"This post originally appeared at the Christensen Institute<\/a> on April 25, 2017.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Earlier this month, after two exhilarating and exhausting days at the Blended and Personalized Learning Conference in Providence, R.I., (which we cohosted with our partners at Highlander Institute and The Learning Accelerator), I boarded an evening flight back to D.C. Just after takeoff, a school principal from Virginia seated in the row just ahead of me poked his head through the seat to ask:<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, what\u2019s the difference between blended and personalized learning?\u201d<\/p>\n

First off, I want to say kudos to this school leader, who had also attended the conference. Over 48 hours of sharing practices, research, and challenges had me running on fumes. But he was tireless and eager to push the conversation forward.<\/p>\n

Second, this moment felt distinctly like a healthy dose of karma given the title we had used for the conference. Not wanting to box ourselves too narrowly into one approach or model, we had taken the route of dubbing the conference theme \u201cblended and personalized learning.\u201d That phrase has become so common in the education lexicon that it\u2019s almost like a single, deeply unfortunate compound noun\u2014blendedandpersonalizedlearning. It\u2019s a mouthful. Not to mention, it hardly lends itself to a pithy hashtag.<\/p>\n

I particularly don\u2019t recommend overusing the phrase\u00a0because collapsing these two terms\u2014blended and personalized\u2014risks diluting the clarity of each and confusing the leaders and educators expected to do the hard work of educating real students in real schools.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s the gist of what I discussed with\u00a0that school principal, and how we at the Christensen Institute try to make a clear distinction between these related but distinct terms.<\/p>\n

Blended learning\u00a0<\/strong>is a modality of instruction. As we at the Christensen Institute define it, blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns:<\/p>\n