“How will you use class meeting time? What types of content, activities, assignments and/or assessments will you have online? How will your students’ online learning and classroom experience be linked?”
I’ll skip right to the good stuff since Chris and Raven have already laid out the general contours of our course (a 4-credit novice-high language course taught 100% in Spanish to a mixed bag of undergrads, grad students, and non-degree-seeking students). And since they both broke down the questions posed above, I’ll answer a related one: what might one of our two weekly 50min face-to-face (F2F) meetings look like in the new hybrid version SPAN 113?
First, we might begin with a five-minute conversation warm-up related to this week’s online discussion-board topic as we always want to start with something active and engaging. Next, we might ask students to complete a task based on materials they’ve been interacting with in the online environment– maybe each group of 5 students read an article about a different famous Chilean and they worked together in the online environment to summarize it; now we’ll have them split into new groups and tell about their famous Chilean before playing a trivia game (“Which famous Chilean went by a nickname?”). Then we might split them into two groups, arrange them in concentric circles, and give them 2min to explain their in-progress online project to the student standing across from them before changing partners and repeating the process. Finally, we might give them time to work together on the project– bearing in mind, of course, that all of their communication must take place in Spanish.
As Raven mentioned in her post, hybrid delivery seems absolutely ideal for this class and the other lower-division language courses; deciding what to do online and what to do in the F2F environment– and how these things will interconnect– has come to us pretty naturally as we already have a really good idea of what works better in-person and what works better online. I think we’re all feeling really excited about delivering this course hybrid-style!
