Blended Toolkit Week 4

• In what experiences (direct or vicarious) will you have students participate during your blended learning course? In what ways do you see these experiences as part of the assessment process? Which experiences will result in student work that you score?
• How will you present content to students in the blended learning course you are designing? Will students encounter content only in one modality (e.g., face-to-face only), or will you devise an approach in which content is introduced in one modality and elaborated upon in the other? What will this look like?
• Will there be a consistent pattern to the presentation of content, introduction of learning activities, student submission of assignments, and instructor feedback (formal and informal) in your blended learning course? How can you ensure that students experience your course as one consistent whole rather than as two loosely connected learning environments?
• How can specific technologies help you present content, provide meaningful experiences, and pitch integration to students in your blended course? With your planned technology use, are you stretching yourself, biting off more than you can chew, or just maintaining the status quo?

I currently am teaching two blended courses.  They meet 1.5 hours per week f2f and 1.5 hours per week online, or I should say, the students should be online at least that much.  At our institution we do not have freedom to change the days the class meets or to meet for two weeks and then be off for four, that kind of thing.  Taking this blended learning toolkit course has challenged me to think about how the f2f sessions and the online work mesh. 

I have taught one of the classes, a basic public speaking course, as a hybrid for over two years.  I have made a big mistake in assuming the students would use the online time to either listen to my lectures (they were in Camtasia the first two years), read them (full text was provided), or watch videos of me (this year).  I also provide PowerPoints and lecture guides for them to follow the lectures with, for notes.  It has become clear that I will have to institute some sort of quiz or verification system that they watched the videos before class.  I hate to resort to quizzes, but that will have to be the method.  Even if my online material does mesh with the f2f activities (which, in this class, are usually oral activities or speeches), if the students are diligent with the online part of the course, something major is lost.  I opted to take out the midterm this semester but think I need to put it back in.  The class has a lot of formative assessment but not as much summative.

By the way, I am glad I taped my lectures, but knowledge and teaching being the way it is, I know I am going to want to do it again in a couple of years!  And that could get into some work.  I don’t really think I would do that again, not for every lecture, except for an introductory one.

The other class is a humanities course.  It is content intensive, which works well for a blended course.  They have readings, PowerPoints, and study guides to work on outside of class.  In f2f sessions, we either watch video, read a play out loud, play review games, or I clarify questions from online material.  They also take some tests in class (and some online).  I do lecture some to sort of provide my spin and narrative to the class.  I do not worry about their experiencing the class as two disconnected parts. I would say that I have “devised an approach in which content is introduced in one modality and elaborated upon in the other.”  I worry that I am providing the content they need to meet the assignment criteria and that I am providing enough time in the f2f to facilitate deep learning. 

As to technology, I think it is great that there are so many tools out there, but I have found that simplicity works better.  Right now my students have to use email, the LMS our institution utilizes, YouTube, Turnitin, and the textbook website.  That is enough!  That is four different logins, assuming they don’t log in to YouTube.  These folks are new to college for the most part.  I think a more advanced group of students could be pushed to use other technologies, but not all of our students have Internet service even now.  I am more concerned about seamlessness, as Professor Merrill talked about today.