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SPECIAL
SECTION: HYBRID COURSES
March 2002 Volume 8, Number 6 |
When
designed carefully, a hybrid course combines the best
features of in-class teaching with the best features of
online learning to promote active student learning. In
this hybrid course primer, Garnham and Kaleta describe
their Hybrid Course Project, funded by UW System and coordinated
by UW-Milwaukee's Learning Technology Center. Readers
can access streaming media clips of participating instructors
discussing their hybrid course experiences -- a TTT
first. (Note: Viewers will need RealPlayer
to download the clips.)
How
can instructors of business and professional writing prepare
students for the relative freedom and independence of workplace
writing? Despite all her efforts, Rachel Spilka's students
tended to work on projects with too much instructor oversight
and supervision, to collaborate mostly in person with writers
they knew well instead of collaborating from a distance
with writers they barely knew, and to manage projects with
regular instructor or peer input, instead of mostly on their
own. She discusses how the hybrid model helped free her
from the restraints of traditional instruction to simulate
the "real world" for her students.
Large
enrollment classes pose a plethora of challenges to
university instructors. Jack Johnson, who teaches a
large enrollment business communications course at UW-
Milwaukee, outlines his major concerns about student
learning in these classes and explains how hybrid courses
have helped him address them.
Peter
Sands writes, "Successful hybridity--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." An experienced
hybrid course instructor, Sands offers five suggestions
to help teachers connect face-to-face instruction with
online work.
This Teaching Scholars Forum article reports on the most
significant observations from the Hybrid Course Project,
in which 17 instructors from five University of Wisconsin
(UW) campuses participated. Its authors hope that faculty,
faculty developers, and administrators interested in promoting
hybrid courses can benefit from their experiences.
In 2001, Frances Kavenik received two grants from UW System
to convert
UW-Parkside's 20-year-old extended humanities degree program,
the ACCESS Program, into a format that better suited the
needs of non-traditional students.
She and team member James Robinson explain the challenges
they faced and the process of converting their program to
a hybrid form, which combines face-to-face and online learning.
(April 2003)
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