Five Simple Principles
Because the online component of the hybrid class is the unfamiliar and time-consuming one, teachers have to pay closer attention to that than to their face-to-face interaction, so long as those face-to-face interactions successfully connect with the online work in the course. Successful hybrids--however that may be defined--requires bringing the two dissimilar parts together so that they work in concert and produce a third result. In the case of effective hybrid courses, there are two dissimilar groups of two that must come together and produce a final result: teachers/students and online/face-to-face classrooms.
Here are five simple principles that may help teachers better connect their online work with face-to-face teaching:
1. Start small and work backward from your final goals.
This is a basic precept of course-planning:
what do want students to be able to do at the end of the semester? What must
we do on the first day, the second day, the third day, to get there? But when
planning major integration of digital communications technologies to a course
careful attention to learning objectives becomes even more important, helping
teachers to avoid a counterproductive focus on the technologies themselves.
2. Imagine interactivity rather than delivery.
While information-transfer may
be more effective online, simply putting materials upweb
will not guarantee
that students engage with and learn from them. For that, you need activities
that require students to perform basic academic tasks, such as summary and
analysis, and that place them in conversation with each other, such as through
responses to each others' summaries and analyses. For every student who says
in my course evaluations that they enjoyed or learned from lectures, there
are scores who report higher engagement because of interactions with each
other as well as the teacher.
3. Prepare yourself for loss of power and a distribution of demands on your
time more evenly throughout the week.
Once seat time is reduced and everyone
is online but not in the same room, opportunities to monitor and manage interactions
move from the geographic space of the classroom to the temporal space of the
week (or month, or whatever unit of time intervenes between classroom meetings).
4. Be explicit about time-management issues and be prepared to teach new skills.
Students who have spent the past two decades or so in traditional classroom settings will have to learn new skills to cope with the distribution of requirements over time, and to cope with their new dependence on each other, for if teachers create opportunities for interaction, then each participant becomes dependent on the participation of the others.
In the traditional classroom, conversation is hampered by the academic schedule: if someone has an idea on Wednesday, but their class meets on Tuesdays, that person has to wait six days to discuss with the class and professor. And that's assuming that the class is small enough--or designed--to allow for conversation rather than lecture alone. But in a hybrid model, where classroom time is reduced and students engage each other directly online, a conversation can be sustained over several days and even weeks.
If a hybrid class meets regularly,
say once a week for a reduced time, then one of the ways to sustain a conversation
is to distribute due dates for reading responses and other writing assignments
throughout the week, rather than just on the day of the class meeting. If
your class meets less regularly in the physical classroom, such distribution
occurs naturally because there has to be a set of assignments and goals that
keep students returning regularly to the online meeting/discussion space.
5. Plan for effective uses of classroom time that connect with the online
work.
This is the most important tip. Recall the discussion earlier about the nature
of hybridity: bringing dissimilar elements together to perform the same functions
and achieve a shared result. If you're thinking about how to integrate the
online and classroom components, it is only a short step to increased interactivity
in your course. Many teachers bring to class one or two responses from students
that were posted online and project those responses using an overhead projector,
then discuss them with the class.
Additionally, by sequencing assignments so that they move students from significant discussion/responding online, through written reflections about their responses and the reading, to group or individual projects that are posted to a common learning space, such as a website or discussion board, for discussion and elaboration, teachers can have students engaged in doing, rather than just experiencing or reading.
Adapted from:
Inside Outside, Upside Downside: Strategies for Connecting Online and Face-to-Face
Instruction in Hybrid Courses by Peter Sands
http://www.uwsa.edu/ttt/articles/sands2.htm
Jeffrey B. Larson, Ph.D
Dean of EICCD E-learning Enterprise
Eastern Iowa Community College District
Kahl Educational Center - Suite 801
326 West Third St.
Davenport, IA 52801
563.336.5237 (O)
563.271.4801 (C)
jlarson@eicc.edu
http://www.eiccdonline.blogspot.com/
http://www.eiccdonline.net/Elearning/