Hybrid ed. is becoming mainstream

PERFECT SYNERGY: Rhode Island College professors Joe Zornado and Marie Bearwood are spearheading the institution’s hybrid-teaching effort. / PBN PHOTO/CHRIS SHORES
PERFECT SYNERGY: Rhode Island College professors Joe Zornado and Marie Bearwood are spearheading the institution’s hybrid-teaching effort. / PBN PHOTO/CHRIS SHORES

Incoming college students no longer on the whole represent their recent predecessors, who move from home to a dorm room and dedicate their time solely to learning – and so, educators say, learning structures no longer should be catering exclusively to that model.
“A lot of our students work for pay off campus and spend more time [than their peers] caring for dependents and spend a lot of time commuting to class,” said Joe Zornado, director of the faculty center for teaching and learning at Rhode Island College in Providence. “[But] they [also] want to be college students. So, we can strive for quality and allow our students [to be] set up for success.”
This line of thinking is part of the reason for RIC’s new certificate in hybrid teaching and learning, a professional-development program aimed to help teachers cross the threshold into this modernized learning environment.
Hybrid teaching, said Zornado and his co-worker Marie Beardwood, the center’s academic technologist, involves dividing course instruction in a 50-50 split between online and in-classroom activity.
For as long as the Internet and email have been around, academic institutions have been utilizing them in various ways – to communicate with students more speedily, to keep them up to speed with developing technologies that one day will factor into their professional lives, and, more recently, to accommodate a new generation that grew up and went through their secondary schooling with those tools.
As generational shifts also have resulted in students who have delayed college or are working part-time toward degrees while already in the workforce, many colleges and universities have offered online-only courses.
Hybrid learning is not that.
“[Students] still need those classic skills that college provides … [and] the most significant piece is [problem-solving],” said Zornado. “This is a lot of what higher education is about – critical thinking. I think hybrid teaching and learning needs to maintain that level of quality.” RIC’s certificate program – which Zornado and Beardwood say is the first of its kind in the state – involves a total 84 hours of class and practicum time that will earn participants a combined 8.4 hours of continuing education credit.
The first half of the course will focus on that in-class and online split; the second half will be a series of team meetings and consultations resulting in a philosophy of hybrid teaching and learning statement.
“[With hybrid] there needs to be some kind of learning-management involved,” said Beardwood. “Why we are offering this is because teachers and students and institutions need to be ready to deliver this. [One] of the things we saw [in research] is that if a hybrid course is done badly, it doesn’t help at all.”
The hope is that participants will be well-equipped to effectively integrate, if slowly, this teaching method in their own classes, schools and higher education institutions.
RIC said the program was developed as much to stay competitive in their offerings as to be a facilitator of programming its students need.
Approximately 33 percent of RIC students attend class part time.
Institutions such as Brown University, in Providence, whose student body is of the more traditional frame – 78 percent of its full-time undergraduates live on campus – may look to alternative, hybrid offerings. The university’s education alliance, which, according to its website, partners with schools and districts to apply research findings in “developing solutions to educational challenges” focusing on “district and school improvement,” has a collaborative professional-development activity that combines in-person instructor engagement and online discussions.
That program is focused on content-area literacy and involves teacher teams from across the United States.
That isn’t the reason for placing some focus on online instruction, said Stephanie Feger, program specialist. “It’s the whole idea of having embedded job development and studies show it needs to engage teachers. Having them participate online really makes it a lot easier to bring groups together,” said Feger. “[It] would be really impossible to get that depth of feedback and inquiry in a face-to-face meeting.”
Johnson & Wales University in Providence doesn’t have anything it place – yet.
After three years ago implementing a blackboard course-management system, first used to facilitate strictly online courses, that requires faculty to interact online with students, the university is hoping to start running hybrid courses next spring.
Those courses, according to university Provost Veera Gaul, will allow students to absorb lecture material online in order to promote robust discussion in class – a reversal of how they’ve so far been using online tools and how some hybrid programs are being held.
“We see hybrid learning as a way to flip the classroom [so] the time spent in class is truly interactive and engaging,” said Gaul. “We believe that’s a way the students like to learn.”
That’s also in contrast to how some hybrid programs are conducted. Many instructors, such as Kimberly Rouillier, the department chair for rehabilitation health at the Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick, see more discussion happening online and lecture-centered learning in the classroom.
CCRI is about to graduate it’s second class in its opticianry program that has been conducted as a hybrid course.
In the program, all lectures are online. Classroom attendance is required for testing and clinical classes.
“It allows students from a wide range of residence and also who are working or have children,” said Rouillier. “[Also] they’re [reading and writing] when they’ve had an opportunity to really think about [material] in a much deeper and richer way.” •

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