Hybrid Faculty Learning Community

Now that grades are all calculated, I’m doing my end-of-the-term evaluation of the classes and making notes for future terms. This process is especially meaningful this term since I’ve been using my spring WS 340 Gender and Science course as a pilot training ground for my hybrid version of the course next fall. Overall I am pleased with the results. Whew! Glad to know that I wasn’t thinking crazy-thoughts about online activities. Here are some of my notes about the two steps in my re-design process.

First, I redesigned the current events news report to be a discussion board activity in weeks 3 and 9. Instead of students writing formal reports, each student participated in an assigned discussion board to post a short analysis and discussion prompts to a news story from the NYTimes. Then students responded with at least two sentences to 2 group members and at the end of the week, wrote a short Final Post in which s/he incorporated their classmates’ thoughts and questions into a conclusion of sorts to their analysis of their news item. In a class with 141 students, I was apprehensive about the amount of time it would take to score their responses but using BB’s option to grade forums it went very quickly. With a clear, detailed rubric, my GTA successfully scored one of the assignments. This was a particularly astute class and they wrote exceptional analyses and it is definitely an assignment that I will include in my fall hybrid course. It works especially well as a write-to-learn activity for low-stakes grading.

The second activity is a testament to learning communities–both formal ones like the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Hybrid Learning Community and informal ones like hallway conversations about teaching and even my carpool! I have always had students complete a poster presentation for their final project and with the encouragement of several colleagues, this spring I made the assignment a group poster. Students created their own groups and I set them up on BB so they could utilize a discussion board, wikis, and email as they chose. Most groups communicated through email and in the face-to-face class, but a couple used their discussion board and a few groups even chose to communicate through facebook. I walked the students through some brainstorming and pre-writing activities in class to prepare them for their outside-of-class meetings. I had not originally thought of this as a hybrid learning activity but it turned out to be the perfect blend of face-to-face and online/outside-of-class activity. The best final poster presentations were by groups who utilized all three spaces to work with each other to complete their individual work and put it all together into successful posters. I’ve been revising my rubric and emails to reflect what worked well for groups this term.

I’m looking forward to adapting the rest of the assignments and activities for the fall hybrid version with these two experiences in mind. Thanks to my hybrid learning community this spring for so many great ideas and to my amazing carpool that always provides space for teaching and learning brainstorming. I hope everyone is as lucky as I am to have communities like these.

The Hybrid Introduction to Media course will meet once per week and will have between one hundred and one hundred and fifty undergraduates. This is both the opening course of our major, as well as a class in the liberal arts core. The New Media Communications area (Digital Communication Arts majors) includes students in media production (especially animation and sound recording) media and society (we are very strong in social networks and game studies), and media management (that is exactly what it sounds like). If that sounds diffuse, it is, and we do this with a very small faculty. The purpose of this class is to provide students an overview of what the media is, how it works (mainly economically and legally), and to introduce a focus on the text and narrative structures as a way of providing a common vocabulary for students in each of our three emphasis areas. In a much more basic, even very career oriented way, the purpose of this class is to provide students an adequate background to be in conversation about any number of media systems and developments for years to come. By the end of this course the students need to play the part of media specialists.

The course will have three units. The first is very plain, asking two questions: what is the media, and what is new media? Frankly, the the answer to the first question is far more important than the answer to the second. This unit really isn’t that exciting, and given that this is the start of the fall quarter, the students should be relatively fresh. Things start to get more interesting in the second unit on media economics and regulation. The students will start to learn about how media business works, and will do mini-debates in their class time. This unit will start to flip the classroom in that it will rely less on lecture material, and more on thinking through active debates in media regulation. The third unit will be fun, the students will be learning about narrative as a unifying aspect of multiple media types, and will be asked to play video and computer games as a part of their online/outside activities, and will play some story building games in class. At this point the students should be highly engaged and will have shifted from recall driven learning, toward evaluation. Example: in the first unit, they will learn what the largest media companies are and what they do; in the third unit they will review games and decide if narratives are effective or ineffective.

I decided to make these units distinct because the fulfill learning outcomes and call for very different kinds of learning at different points in the quarter. I layered the most memorization intense work in the beginning, the most dialectically rigorous material in the second unit, and the more introspective material in the third. The relationship between class time and homework will change through the course. As unit two goes on, the students will be working together on discussion and debate tasks increasingly. The outside course work will shift from heavier reading loads toward heavier experience loads; specifically more games will be played and television programs watched. Although the class is lightening in an important way the kinds of questions the students will be considering will be increasing in complexity, and hopefully starting to help them develop their future interests.

There are two major things happening in my hybrid course redesign – pulling the content to be tighter with the learning outcomes, and trying to rethink the class to fit with the kinds of storytelling we teach. (Transmedia). The big idea that I am trying to think through is finding a way to make an entire course a game. There are several approaches:

Normally, I teach games in a limited sense. We play on a set day with teams. This works, but is confined to a single session of a class.

A second larger game can take multiple classes.

An illegal game would use student grades as a form of scoring. This would not be optimal, but it really would hot wire motivation into the core of the game.

A legal, but sort of boring game, would use a token economy. I am not sure that college students want to have bathroom passes…

There must be a way to make the entire course into a compelling game, my current idea might involve a yellow jersey type system from the Tour de France, but then, what do I tie that to?