This presentation is an introduction to redesigning your face-to-face course to be offered in blended mode. For definitional purposes, I refer to a blended course as one in which seat time has been reduced, to be replaced by online learning activities. Thus a blended course attempts to take advantage of both face-to-face and online learning environments. Equally important, a blended course has been designed as such. This presentation is an attempt to suggest what that redesign might involve.

We have identified ten questions for you to consider when redesigning your course as blended. Why ten questions? Why these ten questions, and not others? I don’t think there’s anything special about the number “ten” here, though it’s a nice round number. I think the list of ten questions doesn’t necessarily exhaust the territory, either.

What is important here, it seems to me, is that the ten questions cover a pretty broad range of issues that our experience – and the scholarly literature on blended learning – tells us instructors are likely to encounter as they redesign their courses.

More to the point, we’ve found that when instructors consider our ten questions for the first time, it begins a process of what I like to call “defamiliarization.” That is to say, the ordinary modes of teaching in traditional face-to-face courses that we typically take for granted are brought fully into question, and first made objects of reflection, then deeper query and investigation. As instructors work their way through the ten questions, they start to ask, often for the first time, why we teach courses in a traditional manner. All of a sudden, the face-to-face mode starts to seem artificial rather than natural; the frame of teaching becomes visible and open to change. As instructors examine this traditional framework, they begin to think of face-to-face teaching as limiting, and appreciate the opportunities that blended learning can afford.

All that said, I’m going to take you on a tour of the ten questions, one by one, and suggest some of the possibilities they reveal. What do you want students to know when they have finished taking your blended course?

This question is important because it reminds us that learning technologies are not central to blended learning. Course learning objectives are what count, and therefore the first question is to identify these objectives as precisely as possible. We might even go a step further, and ask ‘what do you want students to be able to do’ when they have completed the course? This reminds us that the process of learning is not a passive intake of information transmitted from the instructor to the students. Instead, it is an active dialog in which students participate not as equals to the instructor, but as partners who take responsibility for their own learning. As you think about learning objectives, which would be better achieved online and which would be best achieved face-to-face?

This question raises the initial question: what is online learning meant to accomplish in this course? Is there something that can be done equally well, or even better than, what can be achieved in a solely face-to-face course? Some learning objectives, e.g., those that involve student performance or that require “full body contact” to transmit information using all possible channels of communication, really do require face-to-face activity. An obvious example would be clinical situations in which the students display their mastery of a particular skill.

On the other hand, many learning objectives can be demonstrated as well online, or even better than in face-to-face context. If I ask a student to assess a print advertisement or a video, it is more likely that the task will be realized through the student’s reflection, commentary given (and taken in its turn), resources from the Internet brought to the issue at hand, and so forth. In this case, the learning objective would be less satisfactorily met face-to-face than if there were at least a preliminary session online that prepares or rehearses the student’s work for class scrutiny.

Naturally, disciplines (and within disciplines, individual courses) differ in the way that learning objectives are framed and realized. This question is intended to evoke a discipline-based response. Blended teaching is not just a matter of transferring a portion of your traditional course to the Web. Instead it involves developing challenging and engaging online learning activities that complement your face-to-face activities. What types of learning activities do you think you will be using for the online portion of your course?

One of the first impulses of an instructor who is moving part of a course online is to try to replicate as closely as possible what is already being done in the classroom. This is not really a course redesign per se; it’s an attempt to maintain the traditional face-to-face format in a new setting.

A better way to think about this question is to ask what can be done online that can be accomplished better than in a face-to-face class? What is different about the online environment that allows an instructor to do things differently rather than to maintain the status quo?

Here’s a simple example. In the face-to-face classroom an instructor typically will not be able to get more than a very small percentage of the students to speak up and participate, no matter how hard the instructor tries. But in an online situation, if you require students to participate, they have no choice but to comply since they won’t get a satisfactory grade unless they do. So to continue this line of thought, if you could ask your students to say something and know that you would get an answer, what would you ask? What could they say that would be interesting, important, engaging, and demonstrate their mastery of a course learning objective in an entirely new way? Put this way, it’s as if you were having an innermost wish fulfilled. What would it be? Online asynchronous discussion is often an important part of blended courses. What new learning opportunities will arise as a result of using asynchronous discussion? What challenges do you anticipate in using online discussions? How would you address these?

This question could be seen to arise out of the previous one, since so many instructors use online discussions as a basis for their hybrid course. But it asks the question in a new way. I run into a lot of instructors who say that basically their class is a means to transfer factual information from the instructor to the students, so there is really nothing to talk about. I find that answer slightly wrong-headed: every field of study has its own fundamental questions that are debated in the formal academic literature. It’s true, of course, that students may not be able to make a substantive contribution to those questions, but nonetheless trying to grasp what is the basis of inquiry in a given discipline is an important exercise in itself.

Moreover, every field has its own mode of application to the “real” world. For students to examine that application in their own lives helps to ensure that they will be engaged with the course material instead of merely trying to memorize it. Instructors should ask themselves, what counts as a good approach to a typical problem in my discipline? There’s usually more than one to this question. Why would one be preferred over another, and under what circumstances? What would students have to know to be able to answer the critical questions in my area of study? How will the face-to-face and time out of class components be integrated into a single course? In other words, how will the work done in each component feed back into and support the other?

I refer to the pedagogical relationship between online and face-to-face work in a hybrid or blended course as “closing the loop” between the two. The same impulse that makes instructors simply want to transfer face-to-face material to an online environment seems to be operating here in a slightly different guise. An instructor may decide to introduce online work, but consider it to be secondary and unimportant, sort of icing on the cake of the more significant face-to-face portion of the course. As a result, the instructor winds up running two courses in parallel, one face-to-face and one online. The two components of the course never intersect or influence one another.

The key to integrating both modes of learning is to ask ‘how can the face-to-face and online pieces of this course work together to make the learning that occurs in each component more valuable, leading to a deeper or more complex understanding of the course material’? If the answer to this question is ‘ there isn’t any connection between the two’ then the relationship of the learning activities involved to the course objectives must be re-examined to figure out whether the course module is indeed serving a pedagogical purpose, whether its focus needs to be adjusted.

For instance, one customary way to make the two aspects of the course work together is to have one serve as rehearsal for the other. If I show a video in class, can my students then discuss relevant aspects of that video online? If my students are completing a team project online, can they benefit from criticism and discussion of its main themes before they make the actual team presentation in class? Students typically gain significantly in understanding by explaining their approach or thought process in more than one context, particularly if they would be disinclined to speak out in a face-to-face setting, but would find themselves obligated to do so online. When working online, students frequently have problems scheduling their work and managing their time, and understanding the implications of the blended course module as related to learning. What do you plan to do to help your students address these issues?

In a purely face-to-face environment, we don’t think very much about time as a teaching resource. The students show up for class (or they don’t), take their tests, turn in their papers, all according to a published schedule. This partly reflects the social stability of face-to-face contact, but also the general stodginess of a traditional face-to-face course, which is more or less on “slow time”!

In a hybrid course, the use of time is more interesting and complex, because it becomes a resource that you can use to pedagogical advantage. For instance, some instructors perform basic content delivery and routine testing outside of class time, so that the class time becomes more valuable in return, used principally for interactive learning rather than for “seat time” in the dullest, most restrictive sense of that phrase.

Another good use of time is to define the sequence of assignments that lead to the completion of a learning activity. For instance, requiring students to hand in a term paper on the last day of a course is usually an excellent way to ensure that you will wind up grading a lot of really bad papers. Having students instead submit their assignment in stages, with feedback and assessment occurring at each stage, provides them with the kind of information that can be used to advantage to improve their understanding of the subject at hand: in other words, the paper becomes a way to learn rather than simply one more hurdle to be overcome. One feature of time is that it operates somewhat differently online than face-to-face: asynchronous discussions (post anytime, anywhere) have a different cadence than synchronous (real-time) conversations. You can take advantage of this difference, but you must take it into account when you establish a timeline for students to enter and participate in the dialog. The same thing applies to online group projects, which take longer and involve more organizing skills, but have the potential for more complex learning. In short, your students need you to take time into account, and to produce a schedule for the assignment that reflects the difference between online and face-to-face work. How will you divide the percent of time between the face-to-face portion and the online portion of your course?

Participants in our faculty development program often ask us how much of a course should be online, as if there were an implicit canon to be revealed only to the cognoscenti. There is no comprehensive answer to this question, since it depends very much on circumstances: the nature of the discipline, the level of the course, the experience of the students, and so forth. But there are a couple of different ways to approach the answer.

First, the most foundational response is to ask ‘which of my course objectives can be better accomplished online than face-to-face’? And having asked this question, determine how much time would be required to perform the learning activities associated with these online course objectives. Ultimately, what is done where is an issue of where one’s learning objectives are most effectively achieved, and how long it takes to do so.

A second approach is more experimental, which is consistent with the use of hybrid or blended learning as an exploratory mode of instruction. I call this the 5% solution: ask yourself, ‘what would my students do in an online learning activity that would be worth 5% of their course grade’? Then build that activity into the course schedule, and work with it until you feel comfortable. Once you’ve done that you can ask the question again about an additional 5%, and the answer will come more quickly this time. In other words, you are gradually incorporating online learning activities into your face-to-face course, which becomes more hybrid as you do. You don’t have to do everything all at once, which is a nice feature of the hybrid as opposed to a fully online course, where it’s all or nothing. How will you divide the course grading scheme between face-to-face and online activities? What means will you use to assess student work in each of these two components?

This question is related to the previous one in the sense that deciding how to grade your students is closely linked to what they are doing in each of the two components of the course, and the course objectives you are asking them to meet. That is to say, asking your students to work face-to-face or online is tantamount to asking them to do something, and what your students do in its turn raises the question of what evidence you are willing to accept that they can in fact do what you have required.

In many courses, students must learn the basic concepts and findings of their discipline. In such a case, online testing may be a simple way of drilling them and finding out whether they’ve got the basics well in hand. By contrast, if you are asking the students to work online to take advantage of the greater reflection and resources available for online asynchronous discussions, then your grading will correspondingly emphasize the discursive or argumentative nature of the students’ work.

What is central here, I believe, is the idea that you use assessment to improve the students’ learning in a manner that directly reflects what specific evidence of that learning needs to be made available to satisfy your learning objectives as the instructor of the course.

I note that just as the hybrid or blended learning environment lends itself to a more resourceful use of time both face-to-face and online, the assessment of learning in a hybrid or blended course also exposes the different fashion in which time functions in such situations. In a traditional face-to-face course, assessment tends to be infrequent, high-risk, and summative (i.e., three tests and a term paper). In a hybrid or blended course, assessment tends to be frequent, low-risk, and progressive. It is not at all atypical for there to be 40 or more assessment opportunities in a hybrid course, organized to produce early feedback to students regarding their work in the course, to keep them engaged throughout the semester, and to encourage them to improve their skills and understanding of the subject matter. Students sometimes have difficulty acclimating to the course Web site and to other instructional technologies you may be using for face-to-face and online activities. What specific technologies will you use for the online and face-to-face portions of your course? What initial steps can you take to assist students to become familiar with your Web site and those instructional technologies? If students need help with technology later in the course, how will you provide support?

In an ordinary face-to-face course we usually assume that the students can manage their instructional technologies adequately, e.g., that they’ll remember to bring a pen and paper to class to take notes, that they’ll buy the textbook and figure out how to read it, that they can handle a word processor or a Scantron testing form. These assumptions are often brought into question in a hybrid or blended course, however, Any course that depends on the frequent use of Web-based learning technologies is raising the bar accordingly, and you can usually expect that your students will turn first to you when they run into difficulties.

There are several recommendations that we can offer to help you out. One of the most obvious is to make sure that you use technologies that are stable, reliable, and don’t require a lot of instruction for the students to use them effectively. Just to give you an example, discussion forums are pretty foolproof, while anything that involves audiovisual downloads can be tricky.

Another recommendation is to know where to go for help. Every campus supports some learning technologies and not others, and every campus has help available – sometimes on a 24/7 basis. Know where to go and whom to ask when things go wrong (they will, sooner or later).

Finally, the easiest way to ensure that your students can use your course learning technologies is to get them to do so as soon as possible in the semester. There is no substitute for an introductory assignment that provides a low-stakes forecast of the technologies that will be used during the course, and that asks students to demonstrate their ability to use them. There is a tendency for faculty to require students to do more work in a blended course than they normally would complete in a purely traditional course. What are you going to do to ensure that you have not created a course and a half? How will you evaluate the student workload as compared to a traditional class?

We’ve coined the phrase “course and a half syndrome” to describe a very common feature of hybrid or blended learning: an instructor finds, partway through the course, that s/he’s simply packed too much stuff – too much course material, too many assignments – into too small a space. The students burn out, and so does the instructor. In fact, if I had to identify the most common response from instructors following their first hybrid course, number one would be ‘teaching hybrid is great! I want to do it again’ while number two would be ‘but I really need to cut way back on what I’m requiring the students to do.’

The initial reason for the course-and-a-half syndrome is very straightforward. In a burst of enthusiasm, an instructor designs the course by taking all the traditional face-to-face content and activities, then adding on top of that a bunch of online content and activities; result, too much work for one course. I note that there may also be an underlying theme of rigor, since the instructor may be trying to demonstrate to the department – and to her/himself – that a hybrid course can be every bit as demanding as a traditional face-to-face one. There’s a hidden reason for the course-and-a-half syndrome, however, that gradually became apparent to us over the years, but in retrospect makes a lot of sense. If you don’t actually redesign your course for teaching and learning in blended mode, but instead treat it as two distinct learning environments running in parallel with one another but not connecting, then course and a half is almost inevitable. To keep the course within bounds, you have to ensure that each learning activity – whether online or face-to-face – meets a specific learning objective, that it underscores and reinforces the integral link between the two modes of learning, and that the assessment of that learning in fact produces the evidence you seek that students have met a particular goal of your course.

I wouldn’t say that this is easy to do. Like any aspect of the art of teaching, it takes practice to get it right. I still don’t quite get it right until I’ve taught a hybrid course 3 or 4 times, but I’ve accommodated myself by arbitrarily deleting 20% of the course content, activities, and assessment after I’ve designed my syllabus! It isn’t pretty, but I know my limitations. In summary, redesigning a hybrid or blended course isn’t a ‘gimme’; it takes real work, and it takes time. There’s a reason why we recommend that you set aside approximately 3 months to redesign a course to include online work. But reviewing each of these ten questions as you develop your syllabus, trying to answer the questions afresh at each stage, keeps you alert to the issues that can arise, and to the opportunities you have to deal with them. For additional information on blended teaching and learning, we invite you to visit the UW- Milwaukee blended/hybrid resource page at http://hybrid.uwm.edu. For questions about this program, and for individual questions directed to the staff of the UW – Milwaukee Learning Technology Center, please do not hesitate to get in touch via [email protected].