The author has previously reviewed in his Critical Project paper (www.geocities.com/jimrorke/EDTC6300CI.html) the basic background of what are Blended or Hybrid (B/H) courses. These types of courses combine classroom and Distance Education [DE] instruction) to some degree and, therefore, effect (advantages and disadvantages) the faculty and the enrolled students.
In the current paper, the author discusses the training of faculty to provide these courses, since he is scheduled to be trained on the weekends next Spring 2004 in develop ing and designing B/H courses for foreign language training. The paper is divided into two parts:
Distant Education Instructor receives no visual cues as does the teacher in teacher-class discussions. The instructor is challenged by reaching a wider student audience, meet the needs of students unable to attend on-campus classes, involve outside speakers otherwise not available and link students from different social, cultural, economic, and experiential backgrounds. Instructor must begin the DE course planning by studying distance education research findings, and review existing materials for content and presentation ideas, in order to understand strengths/weaknesses of possible delivery systems (audio, video, data, and print, develop hands-on training, set rules, guidelines, and standards. DE institutions insure each site has proper equipment, provide toll-free hotline for reporting and rectifying problems, keep students materials organized, use manageable number of sites and students, assist students in becoming familiar with delivery technology and prepare them to resolve technical problems, learn about students' backgrounds and experiences, students' different communication styles and varied cultural backgrounds. These factors help students take responsibility for their learning,
Teaching skills:The instructor must realistically assess the amount of content to be delivered, be aware of students' different learning styles, avid long lectures, intersperse content presentations with discussions and student-centered exercises, use print component to supplement non-print materials, use locally relevant case studies, be concise, develop strategies for student reinforcement, review, repetition, and remediation.
Improving Interaction:Early in the course, instructors require students to contact the instructor and interact among themselves via e-mail. Instructors should also arrange telephone office hours using toll-free number for students to reach them during office hours. Other delivery systems include one-on-one, conference calls, fax, e-mail, video, and computer conferencing. Contacting each site or students weekly is important. Emails for feedback regarding course content, relevancy, pace, delivery problems and instructional concerns is becoming standard. The use of on-site facilitator is also important to stimulate interaction when students are hesitant to ask questions. On the other hand, individual students should not be allowed to monopolize class time. b>
Instructors should make detailed comments on written assignments and refer in to additional sources for supplementary information, return assignments without delay by using critically timely fax, and email.
Strategies for Teaching at a Distance, Distance Education at a Glance, Guide 2>at, Tania Gottschalk, University of Idaho, Engineering Outreach, May 5, 2003, www.uidaho.edu/eo/dist2.htmlOften student develop myths about B/H courses. Student Myths about B/H courses and their needed corrections by faculty include:
The Key Issues of B/H courses are:
B/H courses may be for people who need an alternative delivery format because of their busy schedules, but who also need the support structure of a traditional classroom? In B/H courses, seat time is reduced and some activities-information transfer, exchange of ideas, testing, essay-writing are distributed throughout the semester with student accessing course materials and performing other tasks online though off-the-shelf Course Management System (Blackboard, Prometheus or WEbCT), e-mail or streaming video. B/H courses become defacto writing-intensive courses for instructors.
Center for Distributed Learning's excellent example is at the website: www.distrib.ucf.edu/dlucf/home.html. The following issues are discussed:Obstacles include:
Instructor attention is focused: Instructors have to pay closer attention to online segments than to face-to-face interaction. Successful B/H courses require bringing the two dissimilar parts (B/H and face-to-face) together to work in concert to produce a final result: teachers/students and online/face-to-face classrooms. The Center concludes that "much of the research is a distillation of experience rather than a synthesis of published studies."
Teaching with Technology, Vol 8, Nr. 6, Inside Outside, Upside Downside, Strategies for Connecting Online and Face-to-Face Instruction in B/H Courses, Peter Sands, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at courses.durhamtech.edu/tlc/www/html/Special_Feature/hybridclasses.htm and Student Problems with Hybrid Coursesat http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/LTC/Educause2002PreparingHybridcopyright.pptWriting Across the Curriculum Movement (Bazerman and David Russell, McLeod and Margot Soven). Suggested text includes "Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace," (Palloff and Pratt) and "147 Practice Tips for Teaching Online Groups" (Hanna, et al) at www.indiana.edu/~wts/cwp/lib/wacgen.html.
The Writing Across the Curriculum Movement Guidelines for B/H courses include:
1. Start small and work backward from your final goals. This may help instructors to avid the counterproductive focus on technologies and more on major integration of digital communications technologies.
2. Image interactivity rather than delivery. Simply putting materials upweb will not guarantee that students learn from them. Activities follow up is required for students to perform basic tasks, such as summary and analysis and in conversations with other students in response to each other's summaries and analyses. Student report higher engagement because of interactions with each other as well as the instructor.
3. Prepare yourself for loss of power and a distribution of demands on time evenly throughout the week. Opportunities to monitor and manage interactions move from the classroom to temporal space of the week or month between classroom meetings.4. Be explicit about time-management issues and be prepared to teacher new time-management skills. Students must learn to cope with the distribution of requirements over time and with ther dependence on each other. Interaction also meeds dependence n the participation of others.
Key: One way to sustain an Online Class conversation is to distribute due dates of reading responses and the writing assignments throughout the week, rather on the day of class. There needs to be a set of assignments and goals that keep students returning regularly to the online meeting/discussion site.5. Plan for effectiveness of classroom time that connects with the online work. By sequencing assignments/responding online through written reflections/responses and the readings to website or discussion boards, instructors can have students engaged in doing, rather than just passively experiencing or reading.
Low-threshold applications, such as e-mail and word processing are already well integrated in students' lives. Students' experiences with e-mail, chat, and web-surfing need to be expanded to fully complement applications of "office suites." The email process no longer needs to be taught, but the file-sharing capabilities of the network, office software, and the browser must be taught as skills through activities. Rather than having students review terms or read lecture notes, have student write definitions of key terms and post them on a class bulletin board for discussion and refinement. Select one to two to be displayed on a computer projector. Just-in-time teaching (JITT) style writing and responses distribute time spent thinking about the course throughout the week and help the teacher teach materials when the students need to know then and are ready to learn them, rather than only at a prescribed times in the syllabus.The article, "More Time for B/H Courses," discusses this issue:
The amount of student-to-faculty contact increases with the B/H format. Engaged in learning activities online, students usually seek out more assistance. More course management tools lead to more work, such as checking out point of access data to see where and for how long students are accessing the course site. If students are not viewing the online learning modules, send them a reminder.
The limits of face-to-face classroom lecture make a big difference. B/H courses allow greater instructor flexibility managing the amount of material to teach in any one week. The instructor is no longer at the mercy of the 50-minute lecture period. The use of e-mail and web-based learning has significantly reduced students' unwillingness to communicate with the instructor. The instructor may choose to create a 15-minute online introduction of him/herself. No significant differences in grades between B/H courses and those in traditional classes.
Their LTC On-line Faculty Training Course/A> is at the website: www.facultytraining.net. Training the faculty on institute's standard learning management system (LMS) such as Web-Ct and Blackboard is required.
At the end of the training, the instructor should be able to:
More Time for B/H Courses: Teaching with Technology Today, Vol 8, Nr 6, Introduction to Hybrid Courses, Carla Garnham and Robert Kaleta, Learning Technology Center (LTC), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, at www.aln.org/publications/view/v2n1/blended3.htm
Many college online faculty use Blackboard, Inc for Distance Learning Delivery and Maintenance. Most Blackboard instructors need little training before placing instructional material on online. Training takes place the semester before Blackboard becomes available to the faculty member. There are three instructional stages of beginning, intermediate and advanced levels:Time-of-need phone calls and e-mails for faculty was encouraged especially in pulling questions from question pools, using digital drop box, and utilizing the weighting system in the gradebook.
The B/H tutorial is helpful for those using Blackboard for the first time or had to prepare an extensive online instruction in a short period of time. The Blackboard software, once learned, is very user-friendly. Testing, quizzing and surveys may be taken completely online. While PowerPoint and Word documents are easily uploaded, instructors can also easily learn to upload images, sound files, and movies.
Offering Multiple Approaches to Blackboard Training, Marilyn Staff, and Anthony Nzeocha, Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL, at www.rollins.edu/it/blackboard/bbseug/presentations/ and Blackboard Training, Black River Technical College Distance Education News, November, 2003, Karen Liebhaber, Pocahontas, AK, at de.blackrivertech.org/News/deNews.htmTeachers required preparation both pedagogically and technically in preparing B/H coureses. Instructors attended workshop to familiarize them with the institute's system and with DE in general. Teacher emphasized the importance of prior training for teaching in an advanced technology environment. This included planning the materials. One teacher commented that he required 5 hours of preparation for each hour of instruction on a one time occurrence. Instructors felt that output was successful, but there were drawbacks, including difficulty in writing complicated mathematical formulae, graphs, or presenting long exercises that require several stags for solution.
Types of interactions included: instructor-learner, instructor-content, instructor-technology, instructor-facilitator, instructor-peers, instructor-technicians, and instructor-institution. Instructors used the Garrels (1997) model requiring instructor enthusiasm, organization (preparing materials, teaching materials), strong \ commitment to student interaction, familiarity with technology, and critical support personnel. DE easily allows for achieving pedagogical advantages in active learning, lessons and course organization, immediate feedback, active student participation, while teachers easily allow getting and giving feedback. Technology online today allows for video, sound, text, animation, and simulation.
Implications of Presenting Pre-university Courses: Using the Blended e-Learning Approach, Moti Frank, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Center for Advancement of Teaching, Technion City, Haifa, Israel at ifets.ieee.org/periodical/vol_4_2002/frank.html.II. Specific Discussion of faculty training at some universities. Return to Top.
For the University of Guelph Office of Open Learning, the DE instructor training requires:
According to the University of Idaho, the definition of B/H courses stipulates that a B/H course is one that is scheduled to have its science faculty member usually meet with students 50% of the time in a classroom to do face-to face work, with up to 50% of the time devoted to working on class materials as well as participating in discussion within a website over the internet. This applies only to lecture/recitation portion of the science, clinical or performance-based courses. Some pilot B/H course projects are required for the student and faculty to physically meet every other class meeting.
Faculty members at the University Idaho developing asynchronous courses for the first time receive three-credit of release time for course development. The faculty member will attend the course management training, followed by the SCCC Media Instructional Designer (MID) in developing a B/H course. For the first year of the B/H course, there will be no more than 7-10 faculty course developers in each semester.
Further guidelines are:
For the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, B/H Course Results include: A significant amount of learning is moved online in order to reduce the amount of time spent in the classroom. This is an attempt to combine the best elements of traditional face-to-face instruction with the best aspects of DE.
Variations of B/H Courses include:Impacts of B/H courses to be considered on faculty and students are:
Student should:
Faculty Guidelines include:
Faculty Development includes:
B/H concerns for the faculty are:
Useful B/H course website includes:
Important B/H Courses Student Elements:
Lessons Learned in developing B/H courses:
Key Issues for preparing faculty to teach using the B/H modes are:
MVU /LCC Faculty Certification Training:
Of current interest, the MVU/LCC Online Faculty Certification is required for all faculty members who teach B/H courses and is available to faculty who teach face-to- face courses. At the end of the course, the instructor is a certified online instructor from Michigan Virtual University after 60 hours of online training designed to prepare instructor to develop teaching effectiveness for online courses.
One main objective is to use the Blackboard instructional management system training for online learning activities. The Center for Teaching Excellence Blackboard series includes five training sessions (2-3 hours each). Individual instructors are trained to use the features of assignment planning, chat discussion board, gradebook, and assessments (www.lcc.edu/cte/workshops/instructionaltechnology.html) to design and maintain an online course utilizing best practices of teaching and learning with technology by applying sound instructional design principles in the development of online courses. The result is balanced instruction, communication strategies and online course management with select media and technologies to maximize effectiveness of learning activities.
Inside Outside, Upside Downside: Strategies for Connecting Online and Face-to-Face Instruction in Hybrid Courses, Peter Sands, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Department of English Vol. 8, Nr. 6: March 20, 2002, at www.isu.edu/itrc/resources/fyi.shtmlIII. Summary. Return to Top.
The author enjoyed research various institutes' ideas, goals, comments, and recommendations for B/H courses, as he prepares to take training in B/H course design next Spring 2004. The author noted that while some self directed students may enjoy 100% Online courses, many students, especially the younger, inexperienced ones, require some structure of the classroom instruction. As noted in the first Critical Issues Project, many institutes also are apprehensive about loosing control of the classroom environment, while at the same time, seeking effective use of classroom space for expected increase of student populations.
The planned B/H courses offer a combination of limited classroom structure and Online study flexibility. With proper training, faculties around the world are becoming more confident in offering a combination of classroom and B/H Online courses. For both faculty and administration, the fear of loosing 100% lecture time is safeguarded by allowing limited classroom lecture/activities/testing/classroom time coupled with reinforced part-time online lectures, activates/testing time.
In foreign language training, the author's interest, the increasing improvement of Online training with speech recognition allows expansion of training foreign language skills (listening, reading, writing, and testing) to now include speech skills.
Overall, the B/H courses offer another educationally sound alternative foreign language training to mature students, who are found able to handle these types of courses. Student training for B/H courses will be discussed in a paper in Spring 2004.
References with URLs: