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nline” proponents will argue that blended learning alone is not enough.  American education can be transformed only if the power to drive change is placed in the hands of students, who are offered a choice of providers that include not only the blended classroom but also those who offer products  exclusively online, supplementing asymmetric video presentations of online materials with interactive systems that employ such tools as Skype, interactive games, social networking, email communications and phone conversations.

Common standards provide a nationwide platform upon which next generation curricular materials can be built

For blenders, the keys to the intervention’s apparent success include the use of real-time performance information by qualified teachers, not just the videos and problem sets.

Apparent success, it must be said, because the impact of neither the blended nor the online version of the Khan intervention has yet to be documented by a randomized trial

Meanwhile, school districts and teacher unions can be expected to fight publicly funded online learning that offers students a choice of taking courses outside their local district school.  If online learning should prove to be more effective than the learning that takes place within classrooms, it would provide a serious challenge to the school district-teacher union duopoly that blended learning does not.