Hybrid Faculty Learning Community

I plan to offer ENGR 390 Engineering Economy course as a hybrid offering in Fall 2014. I have some experience teaching this class online (3 times) as well as on campus in a traditional setting (6 times). The online section typically has 10-20 students. The Corvallis campus offering has about 90-100 students and typically has 2 offerings.

My first motivation for offering the hybrid course is to make a comparative assessment if there is a way to address the limitations and challenges posed by the two previous offerings. By investing this time, I will be able to gain first-hand experience in disruptive teaching innovations sweeping academia. I expect that the experience will allow me to formulate improved strategies for meeting a big challenge in current engineering education of more effectively engaging students in a large class-room. I would also like to tap into the opportunity of addressing learning needs that are more global than local.

In the hybrid course offering, I will use about 75 short video lectures (5-8 minutes in length) that I have recorded for the on-line component of the course. These lectures cover all the concepts needed for the course along with several examples. This will allow students to have a flexible learning platform that will partially address student engagement challenges in a large class-room such as: (a) I missed what was said and now can’t keep pace, (b) I was too tired/sick/bored to attend class and now I am behind, (c) the concept was too complicated at first explanation and I would like to hear it again. Despite, all these lofty motivations, I suspect that many students will not put in the time to carefully study this material and hope to get by the course simply showing up unprepared to class, as is their current disposition.

In order to address the above problem, I would like to add quizzes on Blackboard that ensure that the student is putting in the time to learn the material and that too in a timely manner. I heard some ideas on how it can be implemented with automatic grading without becoming an enormous work burden. I have experimented on this idea with a commercial portal that is fraught with too many limitations. I’d like to put this alternative approach into practice and award 20% of the grade on this exercise.

The traditional format provides little opportunity to implement a term project owing to the class size. I am tinkering with the idea of using small on-line discussion groups (say 10) that will work on an assigned problem in stages and deliver an online report and presentation around Week 8 (10% of the grade). The rest of the class has to review the material and will submit an assignment based on the projects in Week 10 (10% of the grade). This is the most challenging part of the course design and chances are if I don’t get good ideas from my learning cohorts I may well abandon this part of the course.

In the flipped classroom, I’d like to have working sessions to solve problems for which the students are graded for another 30%. The face time will also involve 2 mid-terms for 30-40% of the grade (depending on whether the project route is feasible or not).

I’d love to hear what the rest of the learning crew thinks about my proposed course design.

Life once was easy.  I taught my usual 3 classes, did research.  But then one day I said, you know, it really bugs me that we don’t have a Sustainability degree here.  5 years later (and a new Sustainability degree) I thought, you know, it is silly that OSU, as a major environmental science research mecca, does not have an introductory Environmental Science and Sustainability class.  2 years later I think… you know, that class isn’t really open to everyone because it will only be scheduled once a term and if a class conflicts, the student can’t take it.  And besides, if there is a 100 person limit, how much interaction will there be in the large lecture anyhow?  The personal interaction will all be in the smaller group labs and recitations!  Why not make the ‘sage on the stage’ part digital, and keep the interactions to smaller groups?  And that is the history of why I want to make my 100-person Sustainability SUS/SOIL 102 into a hybrid class.

I think that this sort of lab/recitation class really lends itself to a hybrid format.  Everyone should try it 🙂 as long as they aren’t as easily overwhelmed by glitzy computer technology as I am.  Since discussion and hands-on activities are all handled in a small-group 3 hour sessions anyhow, why not put the background learning content on the web, so that students can learn and incorporate material at their own speed?  Some students learn science in 2 seconds, will take the Blackboard quizzes, analyze the data presented, write what they need to write, and be done 20 minutes later.  Others might need to really ponder the concepts, Google and Wikipedia half the vocabulary, and fret over data analysis and synthesis for a lot longer.  Why not from the comfort of their own dorm rooms, or more likely, the local coffee house?

The tricky part might be in how lost students might get — what if they really need a lot of help with content in the book or with lecture material?  Then again, in a 100 person class, they don’t get help during the lecture part.

My principal concern is over student motivation.  I set the points for Blackboard activities high, and getting through each week’s activities requires reading all the material assigned, watching TED talks, doing online work.  The points for midterms and finals are set relatively low, so that the weekly activities were good carrots.  They get points SUBTRACTED from their grade (a lot) if they don’t come to the lab/recitation, besides not getting the points for the lab, so there is a lot of playing Big Brother for these young non-science major freshmen, likely in their first college science class.  Is there a better way to play Big Brother and ‘encourage’ them to keep up to date and be more self-motivated than they ever had to be in high school?  More carrots, more sticks?

Entry level class in philosophy, especially in Ethics, are most often quite different than what the student expects. First, there is the basic (mis)-conception that ‘everybody has their own philosophy’ and we’re here to share ours and compare. Second, pertaining to ethics in particular, everybody already thinks they know the difference between morally right and wrong, what makes something morally right or wrong, etc.. That is, while we’ve all been socialized into some society with it’s norms, we often simply don’t step back and reflect and question them, so we think the answers are easy and obvious. For these reasons, I’ve found a lot of my work in these classes is enforcing that these ideas are not well founded – it’s a constant job to keep the students thinking critically (i.e. not wanting to avoid seeming uppity with their own moral opinions and being willing to question the views of others) and to not slip back into a philosophical assumption (e.g. that all moral judgments are relative to one’s cultural, or that there are no moral truths) without recognizing that this *is* a philosophical position that has to be defended by argument).

My view is that these conditions make the “sage on the stage” model of conducting a classroom very tempting, as I’ve said, in the lower-division courses especially because students are so easily tempted to fall back into their preconceptions about what is going on when we “do” philosophy. I’m not ‘pouring knowledge into open minds’ so much as trying to keep everybody’s thinking focused on what exactly it is we are trying to do.

My biggest worry, then, is Design Pitfall #3. In light of this, I hope to use our face-to-face classroom experience to ‘keep them in line,’ so to speak, and to give some kind of special warning at those times about the times that I am not there to remind them. I’ll need to think of someway for them to carry the idea that, for example, not all nifty ideas are thereby philosophically interesting, nor does writing or speaking in obscure ways make their work more ‘philosophical’ etc. This will be a challenge to me for the on-line in designing the on-line portion of my class.

The “5 pitfalls” essay addresses the need to view the hybrid course as an opportunity to increase engagement with the student as a step towards enhancing their learning. It is very easy to lose sight of the person on the other side of the screen . The new learning platform is fraught with technology challenges for the student and the professor. Further, the technology development itself is evolving and we have to play a role to understand some of the limitations and work with the development team to fix it. Just like there are skills to be gained in order to be effective in the traditional classroom; one has to accept that there is a learning curve to excel as a teacher in a hybrid environment. This is particularly true for a generation that has not been raised on interacting with gadgets from an early age. All this implies that there is a fairly large lead time to develop, implement and refine a successful hybrid course and it may take several iterations to get it right.

Of the five pitfalls, all but #2 will be a challenge.  My current style of teaching my large lecture course leans heavily on all of the remaining pitfalls.  If I had to pick one that will be most difficult I would pick #5.  My class doesn’t have a tremendous amount of student to student interaction, and when it does occur the students are either compelled to participate (i.e. team activities) or it tends to be guided by me rather heavy handedly.  I think my reluctance to do more student to student interaction is driven by a) the sheer size of the class which makes it rather unwieldy b) my, perhaps too intense, desire to cover all the content in a 10 week sprint.  This desire makes me a bit of a control freak who fears student to student interaction may lead to aimless, off topic forays which eat into what little time I have.

I’m hoping the hybrid model will provide a means for me to loosen the reins a bit.  Perhaps through the groups function I could create cohorts at the beginning of the term.  These cohorts could work together throughout the term to study, perhaps present on key concepts, discuss topics on a discussion board, etc.  My hope would be they would develop a bond and turn to the group for help and support.  Having said that, one concern I have is how to make this meaningful for the students.  I fear it will either be a bust with little or no participation or if I compel the students to do it through points it will simply become a “have to do” item and they will just go through the motions to get the points rendering the exercise meaningless.