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!
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I forgot to mention that the rationale for this is to be able to compare the strictly hybrid with the hybrid with on-campus support.
ReplyDeleteYour hybrid sounds a little like the National Center for Transformation redesign. Google search this organization and you'll be led to loads of information. My second recommendation is to require students who learn material outside of class via video or the text to bring a notebook that contains handwritten notes of the material included in the video or text. This way, students watch the videos as if they are in class. You can then assign a grade each time they arrive in class as a notebook check. By the way, I have recorded all my lectures using Camtasia and these lectures are available with the text. They should be available under Tools for Success in MML. Good luck.
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