Hybrid Courses

When I searched Google, the first thing that came up was UW-Milwaukee hybrid course options. I looked at their description of what a hybrid course was and it was very similar to the one on the homework handout. The main difference was that it mentioned various ways that a class could be hybrid. For example, you could meet face to face for a couple of weeks, and then do everything online for a couple of weeks, and then go back to meeting face to face. Whereas we had a set schedule of face to face every week and online assignment every week. I think the way we do it is better because it makes sure you are keeping up with the class by having a face to face meeting every week instead of not meeting face to face for up to a month.

The online portions sometimes dealt with the current  in class portions, but sometimes I felt that they were just random. For example, last week our assignment didn't have anything to do with the previous weeks lecture, it was just something that had to do with the course overall. I was more effective in the virtual world. Most of our assignments were done out of class, and a lot more of my time was spent working on this class outside of the face to face meetings. I did learn in lecture, but I definitely learned more about class from doing the online assignments and writing papers. On the other hand, I learned more about my classmates from the face to face interactions than from the online blog posts and wiki posts. I am more comfortable with posting things online. I used to proofread things a lot before I would submit, but now I trust myself more and only need to proofread once. I feel more confident that what I submitted is error free because I've had a lot of experience writing and posting things online. I think that online resources are used a lot in UW Courses and there is no need to increase the online usage further.

I think online components wouldn't work that much differently if it was a course that didn't deal with the internet. In any writing class a blog post or wiki post option could be successfully used to better the student.