Summer Project Week 4: Student Workload in Online Courses and Hybrid Course Design

The course I am observing is now nearing the middle of the term.  The discussions are well established and the quantity and quality has begun to improve. Some of the early research project assignments are turned in. Their papers on establishing the independent and dependent variables, for a project that reqires them to set up a research experiment, are very interesting and thought-provoking. I am staying a little behind the course to allow the late posting students to post, before I read the discussions. Next week I will be reading the posts on modules 3 & 4. I have read the course material and have briefly read some of the discussions in these two modules. I am carefully reading the emails and find that these are very thought-provoking as well.

I have begun to feel very isolated from my teammates and the instructor for this part of the eLearning certification; although, the instructor and I do meet about every two weeks. I miss the input of my classmates and the comments that were made to my blogs. At this point, my blogs are not being read and my blog following has almost completely abandoned me. To top this off, lurking has always been a form of hell to me. I read the discussions posted by the students in the class and want to participate. In fact, I find myself wanting to be a student in this stimulating and interesting course. I can best describe observing the course as a sort of out-of-body experience. I am looking down onto the course; but cannot participate. I am watching it unfold before my eyes. Yet, when there are comments that stimulate my interest, I cannot comment. Like a spirit in the cyber world, I hover above the course without being seen or heard.

Last weeks question of how much material should be in the course goes unanswered to some extent. I have spent the last two weeks trying to figure out how much content is enough or too much. I found an article called, “Student Workload in the Online Course: Balancing on a Rule-of-Thumb” written in 2005. From this article I have learned that often the question asked is how one aligns online and hybrid courses with classroom or “on the ground (OG) standards. It seems difficult to know how much work is appropriate. They state in the article that for an eight week course the out of class study time is about 16.5 to 24 hours. In the end the online course has both elements of OG and online best practices per Boettcher and Conrad.

The article states that the hybrid course contains the following elements:

• Assign 1 hour of textbook reading.
• Assume that the student spends an additional ½ hour studying your notes on
  the reading and exploring the links to illustrative material you provide in
  these notes.
• Assign 2 discussion topics with a triple-layered response requirement
  ** which require a total of 3 hours to read and to compose and
  post responses (1/2 hour per layer in each topic).
• Require the students to complete a ½ hour self-assessment to review their
  understanding of concepts from the lecture and reading.
• Stipulate that groups meet online to work on an iterative deliverable for an
  ongoing class project. For example, discussing and producing an outline for a
  final document requires 1 hour of each group member’s time.
• Assign written homework from the text for an additional 1 hour of
  work.

The remaining half-hour is “wiggle-room.” Based on your familiarity with your
institution’s typical student and of the content and activities you have
assigned, you can either require an additional activity (journaling, for
instance), or you can decide that one or more of the assignments above will
likely take a bit more time for the average student. You could designate the ½
hour to those assignments.

With this in mind it appears that asking the question how much material is necessary, for a three credit course with about twelve to fifteen hours of study per week for thirteen weeks, is not an exact science and will take some adjusting to get it right. Most of the articles and text books I have read, state that a group of your peers should review your course before it is posted online to help you get a feel for the things that might need to be tweaked or changed. This might take some of the unknown elements out of the process for a new instructor.

As I looked through the material provided by the instructor in the course I am observing, I was asking myself, if I were a student in the class, whether I would be able to discern what was to be learned, read and put to use in the course based on the instructor’s instructions and comments in the discussion threads. I decided I could.  It was probably a bit much when it came to the materials posted; but as a student I could handle the material with about 20 hours or more of study time, discussion contributions and working on the assigned projects. Knowing me, I would also being doing online research to clarify what I was learning and to get material for the discussion thread, beyond what is in the course materials.  With this in mind, in conclusion, to find out how the work load was going for the students, I would poll them through the questionnaires I would create in Google. This would give me a good idea of where they are and how much time they were spending on the studies.

I think I would consider writing some sort of wrap up of the discussions, even though it would mean more work, depending on the class size, to help the students bring together the ideas and concepts contained in the question bundles and answers in the discussion threads. I find I have a tendency to continue to think about discussions, even after we move on to the next set of questions. It sort of remains a bit of unfinished business in my memory banks. I like closure; but not so much that I stop thinking about the question and all that question helps me understand and inspires me to want to learn more about.

I am re-reading Boettcher and Conrad as we move through the modules and Fenton and Watkins book, Fluency in Distance Learning. Also, I am researching the internet for more information on the subjects I am writing about in this research project. One thing I do know is the instructor in this online course I am viewing is moving through the course with the finesse of an expert. He/she is stimulating the discussion on the material he/she has presented with apparent ease and the students are participating with a depth that is a bit amazing to me, since this is a course that gives an over view of the field of study and not a specific area of concentration.

I am including a video on Hybrid Teaching and what it has to offer. It is a European concept and was best known as “blended or hybrid learning.” As the graduate student teacher in this video states, “…it is the best of both worlds.” There are several different ways to construct the course. A periodic workshop model seems to be the most interesting application and design, but I have been experiencing the two meeting course to date. Another point the student makes is that “…hybrid courses help to keep the course content current.” I think this might be one of the cornerstones of this type of teaching. Also, I am including a website about how to keep the unmotivated or apathetic learner motivated which was posted by an instructor at the University of Wisconsin, Thomas Reeves in his article, “My Experience Teaching Apathetic Students at a School with Open Admissions.” Forty-two percent of his students were in the bottom half of their high school class. The second video deals with designing a hybrid course and preparation. That means asking the right questions to start the designing phase. After listening to Dr. Caulfields’s videos, I have ordered her book: How to Design and Teach a Hybrid Course: Achieving Student-Centered Learning Through Blended Classroom, Online and Experimental Courses, before I start designing my course. I should get it in a week or so.