Hybrid Classes

When I did a Google search for "hybrid course," the first few results were from UW-Milwaulkee. Their website defines a hybrid courses by saying, ""Hybrid" or "Blended" are names commonly used to describe courses in which some traditional face-to-face "seat time" has been replaced by online learning activities. The purpose of a hybrid course is to take advantage of the best features of both face-to-face and online learning. A hybrid course is designed to integrate face-to-face and online activities so that they reinforce, complement, and elaborate one another, instead of treating the online component as an add-on or duplicate of what is taught in the classroom." This definitions perfectly describes our L I S 201 course.

The hybrid course I read about was "Advanced Nursing Practice Interventions" The UW-M website described the course as having online discussions. Two-thirds of the class was conducted in person with the other one-third being online. This is similar to our class in that there is a group discussion page online. This is different from our class because we hold our weekly discussion in person. The UW-M course exclusive holds discussions via the online discussion board. 

In our Hybrid Class, the online material mostly connected to the lecture and discussion material. There were some examples of times when the online assignments were not well tied in and could have been eliminated. An example of this was the iPhone game. Some exercises tied into class very well. An example of this is the activity where everyone tried not to use their cell phones all weekend. I feel like I learned better in the in person sections of the course. In some situations I learn as effectively through online material but this would be in the form of video lectures not web posts. I learned more from my fellow students through in class discussion rather than the online blog posts. UW instructors should increase the online presence of their classes buy utilizing tools such as Desire2Learn and by posting video recorded lecture to the course websites not by using web blogs.

The course lectures and readings definitely brought a better perspective and made me think more in depth about the online assignments. The use of online material like we used in this class would not work as well if the course wasn't about the online world of information.