Pitfalls and Challenges to Avoid Them

Reading through the many pitfalls of online courses helped me reflect on the content of my face-to-face and online courses. The Hybrid approach that I am working toward deploying next term, is a way for me to carefully scrutinize and evaluate the content of both, the F2F and online course as I restyle and refashion it for the Hybrid format. Currently, I am guilty of uploading content into my online course directly from the F2F approach – although I do tweak the course considerably throughout the term – I am still guilty of preserving quite a bit of the content. I want to avoid this, I want to make the course more interactive, offer a few more hands-on activities, and keep it short, succinct, and yet visually appealing. I will avoid this pitfall because I am aware of it, I have recognized it; I think that’s the first step to making a change. Restructuring or refashioning content is difficult as it is very time-consuming and there are lots of good ideas out there, but the challenge remains with selecting which ones work best for you. I tried facebook group pages, but they are difficult to monitor as stats are not downloadable and activity cannot really be tracked. Because I teach 3 courses every term, I have to divide my time between my classes which leaves very little time to make substantial changes to one course and disregard the rest 🙁 I presume adopting the piece-meal approach might be a better way to go? I look forward to some responses to addressing these challenges.

Additionally, while I am not guilty of thinking that students do not learn from each other, I struggle with trying to get them to go beyond writing short, cursory replies rather than engaging with the readings and tying together concepts, examples, and case studies. I have tried Blogs in Blackboard, but did not find it too effective. I was thinking of using Wikis for the Hybrid course. Anyone have any ideas on what’s more effective? Anyone use a rubric that you wouldn’t mind sharing?

I’ll stop here 🙂