By Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, OSU School of Writing, Literature, and Film
If you teach, you’re teaching a hybrid course. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re teaching a course with a “hybrid” course designation in the current OSU catalog, and it might not mean that you’ve taken a hybrid course workshop with Cub Kahn, digital learning consultant for CTL and Ecampus, but every course being taught is in some ways a hybrid course – it’s just that not every course admits it. Maybe I ought to explain.
When I started teaching in my PhD program, many years ago, we were introduced to some of the theory behind discourse communities. I suspect we read Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical work and composition scholar Patricia Bizzell’s research. We were encouraged to think of our classrooms as discourse communities—a group of people that would come to share values, terminology, and ideas for the term. The hours we would meet in-person would solidify these concepts and encourage academic, professional and personal growth. Yet, when learning about the potential power of a discourse community, something always seemed off to me.
Ultimately, I decided what felt odd: while I did my best as a teacher to make the hours we spent together educational, meaningful, and maybe even a bit enjoyable, these few hours per week only amounted to a small part of the rich, complex, and sometimes complicated worlds of my students. Especially when teaching freshmen or students with major time commitments outside of school, the few hours we had together every week never seemed adequate.
I write this not to suggest that our in-class time isn’t enough, or that the concept of discourse communities isn’t valid, but instead to emphasize that our classes are just one of the many layers of everyday life for our students. The few courses you teach every term are often the center of your work life—and rightly so—but that centrality can slightly warp our expectations of how central those same courses often are (and arguably could be) for our students. Our students have hobbies, families, jobs, relationships, and three or four other courses every term to maintain. They’re busy people who must also negotiate the many demands that are placed upon their lives.
At times, these demands can seem overwhelming, and just as often, the three or four synchronous hours we have with students per week might not capture them at their most attentive or best selves. They might be thinking about their other commitments and the pressures they face, and they could have the voices of dozens of others in their head, too—voices from the many other online and in-person worlds outside of the classroom. Every course is a hybrid course because learning often occurs in these kinds of unexpected places. While some of those moments happen during class, many do not, and it’s often in those moments outside of class when our lessons are going to reach students best. Rather than reject those pressures as distractions to the subjects we teach, I would rather have my courses work in tandem with them.
So, when I wrote earlier that all courses are hybrid courses, this is exactly what I meant—for our students, our courses take place outside our synchronous classrooms all the time. Our students don’t just have “in-class” work and then “homework” that exists in some idealized third space, so why should we treat all the work they do outside of class as only preparation for in-person class time? An official “hybrid” course at OSU acknowledges these pressures and accepts them as part of the balancing act that all our students navigate every day. (Editor’s note: An official OSU hybrid course includes both regularly scheduled on-site classroom meetings, and significant online out-of-classroom components that replace regularly scheduled class meeting time.)
For me, an official hybrid course at OSU can be designed to accommodate our students’ busy lives—and do so in thoughtful ways where students are engaged in making meaning, synthesizing material, and devising their own ideas. The best hybrid courses are those that have students engage with depth in these moments, too, as they are asked to reflect on readings, answer questions, connect with students they haven’t yet talked to in person, or experience learning that takes place outside the classroom. Good hybrid classes assume that learning can be, and sometimes should be, dispersed at different times and places throughout the week.
One of the hybrid courses I teach, WR 462, Environmental Writing, thrives on this kind of hybridity and dispersed learning. In the class itself, we learn about environmental ideologies and talk about critical and reflective pieces about the environment from the last couple hundred years. Outside of class, students do a fair amount of reading and writing, sure, but one of the advantages of a hybrid class structure (75%/25%, in our case) means that I can ask students to explore their environments in a more experiential way.
Specifically, students in Environmental Writing get to practice writing where they are—literally—in asynchronous reflections in an outdoor location of their choosing. I ask that students pick a location (and report their latitude and longitude) and then visit that same location every week throughout the term. Considering each week’s writing topic/theme, they then reflect upon that space, take notes and photos (and sometimes video and audio), research questions that arise, and then write an entry into their own environmental writing journal. Crucially, these journals don’t stay isolated within the asynchronous moments when students are engaged in observing, listening, writing, and connecting their journal entries with the class material. We comment on and discuss those journals in class, too, thus bridging the many spaces where our class takes place.
Every course is a hybrid course, but when we acknowledge the many times and locations when learning can and does happen, and intentionally structure around those moments into our courses, we make hybridity part of the solution, not part of the problem.
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder is an Associate Professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University where he teaches courses in scientific and environmental writing, writing pedagogy, rhetoric theory, and technical communication. He is the author of Communicating Mobility and Technology (Routledge, 2017), Geoengineering, Persuasion & the Climate Crisis (The University of Alabama Press, 2023), and multiple research articles.
For more information from CTL about effective practices to design and teach hybrid courses, see Blended Learning or schedule a consultation. An excellent resource when you implement a hybrid approach is The Blended Course Design Workbook A Practical Guide (2nd ed.) (Routledge, 2024) by Kathryn E. Linder and Kevin Kelly.
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