Blended Toolkit Week 5

How will you know whether your blended learning course is sound prior to

                  teaching it?

I am not sure we can know for certain, since there are so many variables.  However, we have finally gotten a procedure for peer approval passed at my institution.  From now on, any new online or blended course has to be approved by a mentor, a panel of three peers, and the department head.  Since I have a new one coming up in the spring, I better get cracking!  It has to be done six weeks before the start of the semester, too, meaning no last minute preparation.  Now, how that will work in practice is another matter.  It may discourage faculty from starting new courses, really.  There has been resistance here to anyone having any input into another instructor’s online or hybrid course, just like it is for a traditional course.  So, my answer to this is that one way I would know is input from others.  At another institution I worked at, we had to have panel approval.  It was annoying, but it produced better courses because others see things you miss.

Other than that, I would have to look at other instructor’s course setups for comparison, and/or use a rubric provided by other colleges, such as Chico State’s, which we partially used for our rubric.

How will you know whether your teaching of the course was effective once it has concluded? 

Along with a new approval process, we have a new evaluation process.  All courses will be evaluated online (rather than stacks and stacks of paper, yeah!!!  I would depend on that.  I think it is a good idea to also provide a way for students to respond to specific questions you would have that are not on the official evaluation sheet your institution uses.  The website http://www.salgsite.org/ is good for this, although I like to get honest feedback from students that is not anonymous.  I know that we think only anonymous feedback is correct feedback, but I think (a) if you have a good relationship with students and they know they can trust you, and (b) if they are mature about it and are taught how to give decent feedback on the real issues and (c) if you ask the right questions (example, “What would you tell a student signing up for this course next semester?”) you can get some useful feedback.

With which of your trusted colleagues might you discuss effective teaching of blended learning courses? Is there someone you might ask to review your course materials prior to teaching your blended course? How will you make it easy for this colleague to provide helpful feedback? 

I am on our Online Education Committee, which is made up of instructors who have had a commitment to online and hybrid for a while.  I believe I can talk to them about ideas and problems.  And as I wrote above, we have an approval process that is meant not to be punitive but helpful.

How are “quality” and “success” in blended learning operationally defined by those whose opinions matter to you? Has your institution adopted standards to guide formal/informal evaluation? 

Yes, our institution has a rubric (I helped develop it) for the approval process and is in the process of revamping all student evaluation of instruction, which is pretty much a sore subject everywhere.  The new evaluation will distinguish the instructor from the course and from the the technology issues, which I believe will be clearer.

Which articulations of quality from existing course standards and course review forms might prove helpful to you and your colleagues as you prepare to teach blended learning courses?

As mentioned above, we looked at several institutions’ rubrics before coming up with our own for approval processes.  Blended learning has not caught on here as much as I would like it to.  There has not been a good training process, nor is there real remuneration for  developing new online and hybrid courses.  We also have a retention problem with them, although that doesn’t seem to be the case at other institutions.  Blended Toolkit has helped some of us.