Welcome! This blog contains the reflections of faculty in the Oregon State University hybrid course development program, and all who would like to join in to comment on the topic of blended learning and the particular challenges of design, development and delivery of blended courses.
If you’d like to find out more about this hybrid teaching and learning, visit the Hybrid Initiative. And for more about online learning at OSU, visit Ecampus.
Hi HFLC,
I am a TA at Arizona State University currently developing a Hybrid course for a social science oriented course on climate change. The class has been developed for at least 350 students, it will be thought as a hybrid course meeting only once a week and most materials will be offered online. I am writing you because I have a consult: in your experience, what are the best activities for this type of class? I am aware of the fact that most activities are along the lines of online quizzes and discussion boards, but I am interested in knowing what other activities—to be conducted during f2f session— do you usually use. Are these activities actually a good idea? For example, we have been thinking that we could use some role playing activities (i.e. assigning students with roles on fictional corporations or governmental agencies and discussion climate change) but as you can imagine, dealing with so many students is extremely complex. These activity (ies) should account for %35 of the class final grade and can involve (perhaps must involve) students working in groups. What do you think, any advice? Thank you!
Rafael, thanks for your question. My colleague, Karen Watte, gave some excellent ideas in her comment. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, it’s worth looking at other successful efforts as Karen suggested, and also at some of the research on alternatives to the traditional, 90%+ “sage on the stage” lecture approach. Here are some links I just shared with one of our faculty members who, like yourself, is teaching a 350-student hybrid course:
Michigan State research on hybrid approach to large-enrollment biology course: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131504000326
Very interesting Univ. of Illinois article on techniques for a large-enrollment hybrid course: http://www.rcetj.org/index.php/rcetj/article/view/66/136
Techniques for Improving large-enrollment/low-engagement business courses: http://www.ijbhtnet.com/journals/Vol_1_No_2_September_2011/1.pdf
Eric Mazur of Harvard was one of the pioneers in “peer instruction” and research on peer instruction in large-enrollment science courses; this video of a keynote speech by Mazur describes and even demonstrates some of his ideas well:
This pdf describes some of his techniques: http://mazur.harvard.edu/publications.php?function=display&rowid=613
From last week’s Chronicle of Higher Ed: http://chronicle.com/article/Introduction-to-Ancient/140475/
I also encourage you to visit visit the Hybrid Course Initiative of the OSU Center for Teaching and Learning for more resources and ideas: http://oregonstate.edu/ctl/hybrid-course-initiative
Good luck with your course!
About a year ago I attended an excellent presentation by Dr. Teresa Balser about how she taught a very large Environmental Sciences class at U. of Florida. She made extensive use of small groups as her thought was this ‘makes a big class feel small’. Some of her F2F activities involved having small groups interact with each other…for example, having one group represent an ‘invasive species’ and then having it invade another group who were tasked with identifying it using yes/no questions and then createing a management plan for dealing with it. She also made extensive use of peer facilitators for the groups — using undergrads who had experience or grad students to help in these roles. (I think the use of these student facilitators really helped with management of the larger class.) She also used case studies, guest speakers with accompanying activities, and authentic assignments to engage the class during their F2F meetings.