I had a meeting yesterday--maybe my first meeting on campus that wasn't associated with a job or New Faculty Orientation (which are sort of connected anyway, right?). It was a meeting about offering a blended version of my Core 180 class. The idea actually came from Jason Lief. He was trying to come up with a way for his Core 150 students--all 50 of them--to have fewer corners in the classroom to hide in. So we got to talking about it and he threw out the idea of blending a class, so that half the students came on Tuesday and the other half on Thursday and they did the day they were missing online. I'm pretty excited about it--I often have students in my 180 that I think would speak up if the group was slightly smaller. I polled one of my 180 classes this semester with the statement: I would be most likely to speak up in a class of... a) 10 or fewer students, b) 10-30 students, c) 30+ students. Twenty of the students chose 10 or fewer and while splitting a 180 is not going to quite get their physically, in introducing an online element, I think I may be able to split up the halves once or twice more for online discussion groups. Five students chose 10-30, which reinforces my idea that there are some students that would speak up more often in a smaller class. Seven students chose 30+, which was surprising until I realized that I usually have about 7 students per semester that run the discussion.
All this to say: I'm excited that teaching this class now is already leading to opportunities to enhance other classes, including traditionally face-to-face classes.
And! I hope Dave has a good poll tool for us. If you haven't checked out polleverywhere.com, you should. It's super easy to use, it's free up to 40 answers, and it's a great way to start class--in my experience, if I give students the opportunity to use their phones right away it's almost as if the urge gets flushed out of their system and they're less likely to, as someone once put it, "Look at their crotch and smile".
Hmmmm interesting idea! I'm trying to picture what this would look like for me and what meeting with half of my students for half the time f2f would be like. I think this could be really effective if implemented properly especially in a core 180 situation where you have a large group conversing week after week. You have the (down?) side of having to craft BOTH an online and f2f lesson each week. I am definitely interested in hearing more about this!
ReplyDeleteI had the opportunity to teach a Core 100 section of transfer and new students this semester with only ten students. I loved it because there literally was nowhere to hide. Of course there are still the students who seemingly dare you to get them to participate, but in a small group, they are much less likely to shrug their shoulders and mumble, "I don't know."
ReplyDeleteAs far as scheduling goes, Rose brings up a good point. Would you do the same lesson in-person with both sections? That means one group would always be a day ahead of the other group. Or, I guess you could give the same reading assignment and have one group do a f2f discussion and the other group do an online discussion.
I'm finishing this semester with a blended format in my Business Computer Literacy course. It seems to be working well, but I wonder if this is partly due to the fact that I have a good, working repore with them from our f2f time before Spring Break. I've been thinking about what this might look like with freshman in the fall.
I love this idea and would really like to use it in my Sociology and Social Justice class! I get the luxury of typically teaching small classes (10-15 students) in my social work classes. Sociology tends to be bigger and and I get a lot less discussion. Is this "blending" something we can just do? Or do we need to run it by the "higher ups"?
ReplyDeleteI love poll everywhere too, but would love to learn of any new/different polling tools that might be available!
Glad you're finding polleverywhere to be such a useful tool, Luke! It's pretty slick for f2f courses, but I haven't used it in an online course. Usually I defer to a form created in Google Drive. It's possible to automatically create an embeddable graph from the data collected in the form. Here's some information for how to do so, if you're interested: https://sites.google.com/a/revevol.eu/googleappsschoolex/home/help-center/documents/forms/collect-form-responses-in-a-live-graph
ReplyDelete