Getting Started

Okay. Here's where I am on the course design. I'm still absorbing tons of information from The Rapid eLearning Blog and Word of Mouth. I had been following The Rapid eLearning Blog for some time. I just started with Word of Mouth since it focuses more on using the Articulate products and I've just gotten my software. I actually got a little overwhelmed this afternoon. So I managed to drop back and go on and create the chapter outline for the course in Desire 2 Learn. Doing this helped me identify a nice starting point, Measures of Central Tendency. Students usually don't have many issues with this section, so it should be easy to do. Before I can do that, I've got to create a stunning template. For a semester long course, I think I'll need several different designs to keep interest. I'll also need different designs based on the course content. For instance, the earlier chapters are less computational than later chapters, so I'll use my space differently. I do think there will be an advantage to keeping some similarity between the designs. I could use one design or color for all of the lessons leading up to one test. Hmmm. . . good idea. Five designs, multiple colors. I think I'll try it.

Content should be easy since I have some publisher provided resources. Using this means that I will have to do it all over if we should change textbooks, but I'm hoping to stick with this one for quite some time.

Course Design

I'm just finishing up my 5-week college algebra class and I'm starting to think about my courses for the fall. One in particular is quite a conundrum. I've been teaching stats online for 11 years. I also teach it on campus. The assignments for each course are the same. I've even hosted them in the same LMS (on-campus and online students together). Because of the technology used in the course (online homework, Excel spreadsheets, online surveys, etc.), I've decided to designate the course as a hybrid class. This protects me from having to deal with on-campus students not wanting to do online work. Here are the catches. First, when I changed the designation, my department chair asked me to release seat time for the course; that is to have the class only one day a week with online work to replace the other day of the week. The second catch and biggest problem is that I have two sections of this course and he only wants me to release seat time for one of them. So one hybrid class would meet once per week, the other would meet twice per week. To make this even more interesting, he wants day one for both sections to be identical and for the class that meets twice per week, on the second day he doesn't want me to "lecture", but have a homework/review/some-kind-of-activities session. The problem with this is that 1) my past experience with hybrids shows that they are dangerous. If the out-of-class time is not well defined, they end up doing nothing and expecting you to double up on the material in the one day per week. 2) For those students attending twice per week, they will still need to go home and engage in some online lecture/activity for about half of the course since I won't be lecturing on day two. I'm interested in any brilliant ideas to pull this off. Here's some other info that might be useful about this scenario. We will use the Sullivan stat's book (new to us this fall) with MML. I give several assignments in Excel, some other online projects and a group final project instead of a final exam. I'm very comfortable with Camtasia and I have access to Articulate Studio. I could have access to an area where there's wi-fi (usually), but I don't think that I will have access to a set of laptop computers. The course will be built in Desire 2 Learn.

I'm starting by identifying the topics that I think are best suited for face-to-face and those that are best for online. I'm also considering ways to verify that students are staying on track with their work. If I have a follow up activity on day two, but they didn't watch the necessary lecture prior to coming to class, that won't go over well. In fact, I think the deadlines for both hybrid sections will have to be much stricter than those for my purely online class. That's about as far as I've gotten.

The point behind this is to compare the hybrid course with on-campus support to the hybrid course without the extra support. Please help!