Hybrid Courses

by Evelyn Beck

As distance education evolves from a totally on-line environment plagued by higher-than-average attrition rates, more options may make it easier for students to find the right match for the way they learn best. And many advocates say that increasingly popular hybrid courses may be the ideal approach to combine the best features of traditional education with the advantages of technology. Part on-line, part face-to-face, these mixed mode courses offer students the flexibility of Internet instruction along with the personalized support of classroom interaction.

“The student is completely enveloped in a learning experience using various testing schemes, access to current events through hyperlinks, access to additional ‘help’ sessions from material posted on the Internet by other professors, (and) constant contact with the professor,” says William Wendt, an adjunct professor who teaches a hybrid economics course at Randolph Community College (RCC) in Pinehurst, N.C. “A student cannot have it better than this.”

Wendt’s students access information and take tests on-line, then meet once a week for what he calls “supplemental support.” Class time involves answering questions from the previous week’s material, reviewing economic principles, and giving a mini-lecture on new material for the following week.

“It is impossible, time-wise, to accomplish all of the above in just a regular classroom setting,” he says.

Other hybrid instructors use class time for tutoring or lab work.

For Celia Hurley, the director of teaching excellence/distance education at RCC, hybrids – for which face-to-face interaction can account for up to 30 percent of the course – are especially appealing for courses like science and math which are not suited for fully on-line courses.

“It does expand what we might be able to offer,” she says.

It’s also a way to bring more faculty into distance education, and some suggest that a hybrid course is a much more effective tool for doing so than a regular course to which a web component–and extra work–are added. In fact, proponents of hybrid courses are quick to distinguish between hybrids, which incorporate some face-to-face meetings into an on-line course, and web-enhanced classes, regular classes that require students to complete certain on-line assignments. Wendt, for example, insists that his hybrid at RCC is an on-line course enriched by weekly face-to-face meetings.

“It is not, in my opinion, the other way around,” he says.

From an administrative point of view, hybrid courses allow for more than one class to be scheduled at the same time in the same room. This “reduced seat time” can help ease overcrowding on campuses, though a study by the Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness (RITE) at the University of Central Florida suggests that this solution isn’t as simple as it sounds because faculty desire different sorts of classroom.

“Some faculty want to use the face-to-face time for discussions using no technology, while others want to schedule their face-to-face time in high technology classrooms,” report RITE director Chuck Dziuban and research associate Patsy Moskal. “Finding the precise types of classroom spaces each faculty wants and needs in an environment of classroom shortages is challenging.”

A surer benefit is better student success rates.

“Courses showed very good retention rates when we combined the two methods (of face-to-face and on-line instruction),” says Hurley.

The same has been true at UCF, where RITE studied differing outcomes among what it calls “Web-enhanced, reduced-seat time mixed mode and fully Web-based programs and courses.” According to its report, mixed mode courses have better results than any other kind of course: “classes featuring both face-to-face and Web components achieve higher success rates and comparable or lower withdrawal rates than those that are fully on-line or face-to-face.”

The improved retention may also stem from the fact that a hybrid course demands more involvement from students. In a well-designed hybrid, students must interact with peers on-line, then attend class and face the instructor and their classmates. These dual environments present more kinds of stimulus, from in-class group problem solving and lectures to on-line simulations and discussion boards.

Hybrid courses, of course, do have drawbacks. For example, there’s the potential for class time to be consumed by technological questions unrelated to course material, a problem that can be solved by anticipating students’ technology questions at the outset and providing help in advance; UCF, for instance, issues all students and faculty a CD-ROM that orients them to the on-line environment.

And hybrid courses certainly aren’t feasible for students who seek distance education because they can’t come to campus, though Wendt plans to videotape his classroom sessions for those unable to attend. Yet, he warns, “The one challenge is not to overload the student with too rich an environment, making it impossible to stay up with the course.”

And as with anything new, there’s the possibility of confusion. When does class meet? What are the expectations for students? And what the heck is a “hybrid” course? To that last question, Hurley has a solution.

“This fall, we’re publishing a page describing what we mean,” she says.