- How will you know whether your blended learning course is sound prior to teaching it? How will you know whether your teaching of the course was effective once it has concluded? (Ch 5 Blendkit)
Overall, the blendkit chapter provides many resources and looks at the various ways that we can determine whether a hybrid or blended learning class meets the standards for "quality instruction." Looking over this article made me think about how we work to support faculty at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Vermont.
When working with the faculty at UVM who are designing or re-designing their courses into a hybrid format, I utilize many of the resources we currently use when looking over online courses for quality assurance. We have a few resources to help us guide faculty in this process. We focus on principles of Universal Design for Learning or UDL, look at how accessible the resources are for the course, insure that the course and specifically the syllabus contains specific elements, look through the course structure and learning materials in the LMS - Blackboard, make sure that it is easy to navigate and so on.
Making sure that students know what is going on in a non-traditionally formatted course (not f-t-f) is really important especially when there is a new class model university wide. In the case of Hybrid or Blended courses at the University of Vermont, we take it a step further and have developed a tool for hybrid teaching faculty to get feedback from their students a few weeks into the hybrid structure. The tool, a survey is added into each course designated as a hybrid and launched in week 5-7 to hear from the students. Once the survey is completed by the students, the faculty member can take a glance at their responses and know if students understand that the course is "hybrid," and if they can find things or if they are lost when navigating the course.
Since there are no widely accepted "standards of quality" for Hybrid courses, it is important to review the course plan with others. Other ways to gauge the quality of a course that is being developed or is "ready to go" is to run it by a peer - other faculty members who can give critical and supportive feedback, an instructional designer and also to get regular feedback from students during and after the course is taught. Most faculty teaching a re-designed or newly designed course will have to teach it a few times before it is "just right". Feedback is crucial to that process and involving students and others in that process upfront is helpful to making the course even better the next time around.
Before faculty in the Hybrid Course Inititative Program (at UVM) can teach their course, they must present their Hybrid course plan to a group of their peers for feedback along with a sample learning object or tour of their course. This process allows for last minute ideas and vetting of the course before it is taught to give time for the faculty to do any tweaking before the beginning of the semester.
The resources provided in this chapter are some that I will revisit and share with my colleagues. I have listed a few that I found helpful, and a few that we have put together over at the UVM Center for Teaching and Learning.
BlendKit Course: BlendKit Reader: Chapter 5
Quality Matters http://www.qmprogram.org/rubric
Monterey Institute Online Course Evaluation Project
University of Wisconsin Milwalkee - Tips for Hybrid dev.
University of Vermont, Center for Teaching and Learning - Accessible Document resources
University of Vermont, Center for Teaching and Learning - Copyright & Intelectual Property
University of Vermont, Center for Teaching and Learning - Online Course Design Guidelines
