Better Mileage with Hybrid Learning

By Kal Toth, associate professor, and Kathy Milhauser, adjunct faculty, Portland State University

Software practitioners seeking professional development not only want practical learning that will give them immediate benefits, but they also need flexible learning models that blend with their obligations at work and at home. Face-to-face lecture style courses taken in the edge hours – evenings and weekends – is one approach. Online learning over the web is another approach. Each of these approaches offers distinct benefits. But what about a hybrid model that blends face-to-face with online learning? And what about letting the student, within reason, mix and match the elements of the face-to-face and online models? Wouldn’t this potentially maximize both benefits and flexibility for the student?

In our last article, we showcased a face-to-face course on professional communications that included a number of students participating online. These online students never came to class, yet they were an integral part of the entire learning process and received feedback and grades, just like everyone else. This course really tested the limits of what can be effectively learned through online methods and media.

Interestingly, this course opened our eyes to the possibility of offering hybrid face-to-face and online learning courses. We soon realized that software professionals are already quite accustomed to working with each other online. For them, sharing information via email, instant messaging, multimedia streaming, bug trackers, version control systems, document sharing tools, and collaborative web pages (wikis) – is routine. The jump to online e-learning is small and natural. But most professionals also want to get some of the learning from the “horse’s mouth” – an instructor they can interact with in a classroom setting.

Our observations soon pointed the way to a hybrid vision for learning: that is, one where we simultaneously deliver face-to-face and online learning. Our thesis is that this will realize better total “learning mileage” out of the combined benefits of the two approaches.

Such a flexible approach to learning provides distinct advantages for students. They can first decide on the subject matter they next want to tackle, and then they can decide whether they would rather take the course face-to-face, online, or in some combination.

Consistent online resources for all courses
Classroom courses can be effectively supported by online access to learning materials, course administration tools, asynchronous discussion forums (blogs, wikis) and other collaboration tools. Such tools are also essential for online courses. For some time now we have made good use of our WebCT-enabled course management system – namely, PSU Online – for both online and face-to-face courses. The online components and tools we exploit include: 

1. Course resources including syllabi, video streams, articles, web links and lectures
   
2. Weekly lesson plans pointing to the relevant resources, activities and assignments
   
3. Discussion forums supporting online dialogue among students and instructors
   
4. Weekly assignments, take-home exams and quizzes with submission guidance
   
5. Grading support allowing instructors to record, track and process grades
   
6. Other tools such as chat, shared visual space and e-mail.

Consistent learning objectives, content and pace for face-to-face and online
Under a hybrid learning approach, all students make use of the same resources (textbook(s), articles, papers, hyperlinks to print media, etc.). Furthermore, the flow and weekly pacing of learning is synchronized for both face-to-face and online students. The weekly lesson plan guides activities through a checklist of items, including brief streaming videos that overview the week's key points, posted lectures, textbook chapters and other readings, and posted assignments. Discussion forums are extensively used to engage all students and instructors asynchronously in thoughtful exchanges of ideas and analyses of assigned problems.

To realize a hybrid learning experience, the cadence of student learning through assignments, discussions and project work need to be synchronized across the face-to-face and online dimensions of the course. For example, students in the face-to-face class on Tuesday night could hold a discussion about software quality and code reviews. That face-to-face discussion should be matched in the online learning space with a discussion thread created and facilitated by the instructor. One approach might be to hold an initial discussion in the classroom, summarize the results, and post them online to seed a more in-depth discussion during the week. Conversely, the online discussion might be held first, and the students in the classroom might discuss and post a consolidated refinement of the ideas. A variant of both these approaches would be to capture streaming videos of classroom discussions for online students to use. The challenge here is to ensure that these streams are fairly short and focused on a specific point shared by both face-to-face and online students.

Regardless of the exact timing, students in the classroom – and those in the online version of the course – should have a sense of being part of a larger discussion and of a week-to-week cadence that brings both groups of voices together.

Leveling the playing field
To achieve assessment equity across a hybrid model, grading of assignments, discussions, participation and project work needs to be balanced and fair – whether the student is face-to-face, online or both. Because learning is accomplished differently, achieving such balance requires the careful attention of the instructor.

In the classroom setting, students typically get “participation points” for showing up in a classroom and the instructor tries to get a measure of the quality and degree of participation of all students in the class. The more extroverted students stand out and often make substantial contributions to the class. But some student contributions are more “noise” than substance and in some cases may actually be destructive to the class. Meanwhile, introverted students or those less proficient in English will be less visible or not visible at all. It is clearly not practical for the instructor to count the number of times a given student speaks out, or measure the quality of each contribution fragment of the student. Because of these limitations, most instructors will allocate a smaller proportion (e.g., 10% to 15%) of the total grade for in-class participation and use a rather subjective and low-granularity assessment scale (e.g., poor, fair, good, excellent).

In an online class meanwhile, introverted students can shine. Those with trouble in English can take extra time to express themselves, and the more extroverted students – especially the “noisy” ones – are forced to express themselves more clearly and thoughtfully than they would in a face-to-face setting. The main advantage here is that the instructor can actually count the participation level first, and then examine the true quality of written student postings. Of course, this will generally consume quite a bit more of the instructor’s time, but a larger portion of the total grade can be specifically allocated to the volume or frequency of participation, and the quality of online participation can be assessed with more assurance and evidence than the quality of participation in class.

A critical factor to achieve balance is to assume that both face-to-face and online students participate in the same online discussions. It is important to distinguish between participation in online discussions and the quality of these discussions (for example, a 40/60 split). Similarly, a distribution between participation level and quality of participation could be made for face-to-face classes – but this may not be worth the effort. It would be a simple matter to prorate the participation grade for online students to offset the face-to-face participation grade awarded to in-class students. Another approach would be to eliminate in-class participation grades altogether.

What about team projects?
Team projects, whether accomplished through face-to-face or online mechanisms, are always a challenge. Projects run in a classroom setting generally have the students meeting in classroom time slots, sometimes with the instructor present who is able to judge team participation. Of course, team presentations are a key component of assessment.

Assessing team participation among members of a virtual (distributed) project team is more of a challenge. Often teams will work on their own using their choice of collaborative tools. Some may use simple email with scheduled status updates provided to the instructor. Others will use free tools such as Google Docs and Yahoo Groups. At PSU we have had good success with both PSU Online (WebCT) and wiki collaboration tools. They each have their features, advantages – and also their weaknesses. The instructor becomes a member of every team to provide oversight and guidance, and can monitor the quality of team collaboration. Online tools thereby facilitate project team assessment.

So how do we assess learning and maintain consistency?
There are no easy answers – but the bottom line is student accountability. One level-setting practice that we have used successfully is to create assignments that require students to summarize their learning (whether online or face-to-face) at key points in the class. Another is to conduct peer assessments where each team member submits his or her assessments of how well each teammate contributed toward shared assignments. Again, these assessments are used whether the class is face-to-face or online.

The key is to ensure that instructors are comfortable with the level of engagement, whether the student is online or face-to-face, and that expectations of students are spelled out clearly and reinforced repeatedly throughout the term.

Interaction with the instructor in the online format
An important goal of ours has been to give students easy access to professors and teaching assistants via a blended delivery format throughout the term. In the hybrid model, this is achieved through three vehicles:

1. Instructor-driven lectures: Streaming mini-lectures are recorded by the instructor in the studio in advance of the course or at the beginning of a course session. Students access these through PSU Online and take notes for discussion after the lecture (much the same as they would in a lecture hall).
   
2. Questions for discussion on the lecture topic are posted by the instructor, and the discussion portion of the lecture is conducted in the discussion forum asynchronously within a pre-defined time period for the week.
   
3. Weekly Q & A sessions are facilitated by the instructor or a teaching assistant in a similar format – a 3-minute introduction with an invitation to post student questions in an asynchronous discussion forum.

All of these opportunities to engage with instructors and other students are mapped to the actual discussions in the classroom, thereby aligning face-to-face and online learning.

Benefits of the hybrid model
Students tell us that, because they can schedule their class time to dovetail with their other day-to-day obligations, they are able to spend more time participating in online discussions and individual research. At the same time, the students can attend selected face-to-face classes to get the top-level concepts and issues understood. In contrast, it is common to receive reports of deeper engagement with classmates, instructors and subject matter through the online tools. The net result is better total learning outcomes, improved retention and a highly flexible solution that achieves the degree of integration with work and home life that working professionals want and need. For this reason, we have decided to make online support resources available to all of our OMSE courses, whether delivered in face-to-face mode, purely online, or in hybrid format.

About the authors
Kal Toth, associate professor in the Portland State University department of computer science, is director of the Oregon Master of Software Engineering (OMSE) program. He holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University (in electrical engineering and computer systems) and teaches several core OMSE courses. He can be contacted at ktoth@omse.pdx.edu; see http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~ktoth/.

Kathy Milhauser is an adjunct OMSE faculty member teaching the Professional Communication Skills course. She holds an M.A. in educational technology from Pepperdine University and a B.A. in communication from Marylhurst University. She is currently part of a team at Nike focused on leading process-improvement efforts. She can be contacted at kathym@pdx.edu.