Scenarios for Blended Learning

Colleen Asaad

Finance

Tuesday/Thursday course of 35 students: Preparing for a flipped-classroom-type approach in a hybrid, supportive environment.
Lecture content delivered asynchronously online. Course content organized by week, with structured/predictable weekly workloads and assignments.With the learning outcomes clearly identified, use a variety of resources and assessments to allow for student agency and autonomy.
In class meetings will focus on enhancing memory and collaborative learning. Games/quiz questions will help ‘retrieve’ the learning concepts,alerting both students and the instructor to areas that may need more attention. Class discussions will help ‘transfer’ learning to new situations. An activity will ‘prime’ students for the next topic by stimulating recall of prior learning. End of class reflections for stronger learning.

Laura Croyle

Mathematics

I have a Monday, Wednesday, Friday class with 24 students. I plan to cover course content and engage them by scheduling instruction and using online resources in the following way:

Asynchronous portion: I will create video lectures broken up into 5-15 minutes segments using Panopto and Ziteboard. Ziteboard.com is a website that allows the user to create a virtual whiteboard. If formatted correctly, these notes can be exported as a PDF and uploaded to blackboard following the videos. These videos and corresponding notes will be the source of content delivery.

Synchronous portion: Although this time will be when we have quizzes and tests, class time will be used primarily for “distanced” group work to practice what they have learned in the videos. At the end of class, students will turn in an “Exit Ticket” to demonstrate one of the desired learning outcomes. Depending on the proportion of students that are allowed in the classroom at a time, students will either attend these sessions once a week or every other class period. As students not in attendance will have the same group work opportunities on another day, there will be no need for students to attend virtually using Blackboard Collaborate.

Christina Fuhrmann

Music History & Literature

The advantages of online instruction:

--students can find out more about you. I included my dog in my videos last semester in various ways and several students commented that this was really helpful in keeping them going through the course.

--if you make a video or record your synchronous session, students can: watch it at 1.5 speed so it’s not so boring; bookmark various portions of it (at least in panopto); refer back to it any time for the exam

--shy students can feel more comfortable participating in an online discussion than one in real time

--tests can be timed and you can have questions chosen randomly from a bank of questions; my students thought last semester that open book was going to be super easy, but found out that this was still challenging and required studying

--students can work more at their own pace if some of the class is placed asynchronously. One student commented that they really liked being able to “attend” class during the wee hours when they were most productive.

--avoid assuming that students like group projects. It is best to have group activities either not be graded or else make it optional whether they work in a group or not for a grade.

--utilizing quick quizzes with instant feedback or the ability to retake the quiz multiple times for a better grade can be helpful

--you can take more time to answer students’ questions on a discussion board, where in real time sometimes you don’t have time to explore tangents with them

--you can have interviews with professors at other institutions or with alumni much more easily and naturally

Lori Long

Entrepreneurial Studies

I have a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday class meeting time for ENT 415X Entrepreneurship Capstone Experience. I plan the following instruction:

This course is the final in a series for entrepreneurship minors and Arts Management majors. The main course project involves students working in teams to develop an idea for a venture while taking a deeper dive into business planning methodology. I intend to deliver this course in a blended format, with both online and in-person components.

Online: The course will be organized into weekly modules, and I will engage students online each week with brief recorded lectures, links to online content or videos, and a threaded online discussion for the full class focused on the lecture/online content.

Students will also use the discussion board to get help from peers on their projects. Finally, students will keep a weekly journal in Blackboard of their experience working on the project.

In-person: The class will be divided into three groups, each including several teams. Each week the students will attend one class meeting based on their assigned group where we will engage in activities to apply concepts learned online or engage in discussion around the online content. While the content will not necessarily be focused on their team project, dividing them by teams gives them the opportunity to connect in person with their teams each week. For each class meeting I will have the same planned activities, but working with different student groups on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

There will also be “check-point” weeks where student teams will have individual meetings with me to review the progress of their projects. Students will be encouraged to use the class meeting times when they are not attending class to connect with their teams. For example, if they come to the in-person class on Monday morning, they have the Wednesday and Friday class meeting time designated for team meetings or team work.

Dan Schrag

Accounting

Click on image below to view the Panopto presentation on Dan's blended learning plan:

Laura Hopkins

Public Health

I have a core course PHT 173I (Global Health) that meets T/Th with 25 students. For this course regularly, I do “mini” lectures on T/Th followed by some sort of group discussion or small group learning activity. Thinking about transitioning this course to hybrid. My thoughts are that I will have recorded lectures for the students to listen to each week (mini lectures) and then have two cohorts of students – one that comes in on Tuesdays and one that comes in on Thursdays. On these in-person days, we will do the group discussions/learning activities. So, I would be doing the same activity on Tuesdays and Thursdays with different cohorts of students. Now, I have to think through the learning activities, because they typically involve groups of 3-4 students and how that will play out with social distancing is uncertain at this time. Mostly, this means that I will have to adjust the learning activities so they are not so hands-on, i.e., group drawing activity. With this model, the expectation would be that the day not spent in class would be when you listen to the recorded lecture.

· Another thing that I have done in this course in past semesters is host remote guest lectures. Particularly, I have a good friend who is a biomedical engineer and works/lives in Philadelphia. He has done a significant amount of work with Engineers without Borders in Africa and Asia. Because he lives in Philadelphia, I have him remote guest lecture. Students come into the classroom and he presents remotely, followed by a Q&A session. I have had some students also join the class session remotely because they could not be in class physically for some reason or another. I have used both Zoom and Bb Collaborate for this. Anyway, this has always worked seamlessly. I think this sort of approach could be helpful to faculty – have a cohort of students come to class in-person and the others join remotely, all for a synchronous lecture and alternate the students who come in-person. With that being said, I do think this requires a certain amount of tech to be available in the classroom and I do not know how widely this tech is available across campus.

· Another tool I have been using extensively in my courses is the breakout room feature on Bb Collaborate. I use this feature for small group work then bring the class back together for a larger group discussion.

Christie Needham

Communication Sciences

I have a science based Tuesday, Thursday class, with 20 students, and I plan to cover course content and engage them by scheduling instruction and using online resources in the following ways. Lectures when appropriate will be prerecorded and posted using VoiceThread or NearPod, quizzes will be embedded in the Nearpod lectures and in the case of VoiceThread students will take a quiz in Blackboard after viewing. The students will be split into 2 groups and attend either Tuesday or Thursday. If I feel a lecture suited for in class, I will prepare the lecture using NearPod and will use the webcast feature in Panapto to engage all students in the lecture (allowing students not in the room to participate in real time). Most classroom time will be used for labs which will be adapted to be completed individually. For the students not in class a tic-tac-toe/BINGO board will provide extension activities to complete on their own. Students will be required to turn in these extension activities with each module.

I have a technical writing/clinical instruction Monday, Wednesday, and Friday class, with 20 students, and I plan to cover course content and engage them by scheduling instruction and using online resources in the following ways. Lectures or Instructional time will be prerecorded using VoiceThread or NearPod. Students will be divided into three groups and will attend face to face on their designated day. While in class students will be actively working on revising and developing their technical writing skills with input from me during that time. Since most of my classes start with information or questions from students that are beneficial for all, I will be using Padlets for students to post questions or FlipGrid for video announcements and questions from students. Either of these methods allow me to respond and have conversations with students in a virtual format. On days the students are not physically in class they will be actively revising and completing activities (simulations, case studies, writing assignments, etc.). Assignments will be turned in for progress checks each week.

Amy Jo Sutterluety

HPESS

Click on image below to view the outline of Amy Jo's blended learning plan:

Susan Finelli-Genovese

Educational Technology

This past academic year, I converted the undergraduate educational technology courses EDU-114, 214, & 314 to online platforms within the Blackboard LMS. These online courses were delivered face-to-face in Wheeler Lab this past Fall. Students came to the lab with their devices and worked on the learning modules independently or in small groups while instructors facilitated the project-based assignments. In any given week, the instructor had the ability to flip a class or move it entirely online. Other weeks, students had the option of attending an open lab or working remotely to complete their coursework.

In preparation for Fall of 2020, the lab (and 2nd-floor student work area) have been altered to accommodate social distancing; i.e. chairs have been removed to limit the number of students in the lab or at a table in any given time. Students will have the ability to complete the courses entirely online and/or come to the lab as needed for support from myself or the EDU student tech coaches. Or, I will schedule Google Meet sessions with those that feel more comfortable meeting remotely.

Brian Krupp

Computer Science

Keep in mind that one size does not fit all. In one of my courses that runs Tue/Thu with up to 24 students, approximately 50% of the course is dedicated to in class lab/exercises. To accommodate this structure, I will be using a flipped classroom model so that each day that we are in person we can work through the lab/exercises that day and having discussions on the content that should have been viewed online. For another of my courses which is a second level programming course, I will be using a more traditional structure where I teach live on Blackboard Collaborate and wear wireless headphones to talk to the class online and in person. Most of the course is teaching programming topics through practice, so often I will be coding on the screen as students follow along. These are two very different approaches, but the approaches (I hope) work towards the goals in the course.

This is a more general tip:

I think what is most important throughout all of this is that students see that you care about the most effective way they can learn, even if it means changing the approach during the semester. The other part is making sure that students have a sense of structure and belonging, which is most critical for first year students.

This is my thought on arguments I heard on academic freedom with these guidelines:

I heard the argument that some of these guidelines are encroaching on academic freedom, but I disagree. It is no different requiring an instructor to use Blackboard Collaborate than it is requiring an instructor to teach in a room at a given time. Our university's signature is how we connect with students and work with them one on one. Having synchronous courses (that can be recorded) on a consistent platform allows students to still connect with the professor and their peers. I believe having this structure is critical for our first year students

Lisa Ponton

Chemistry

I have a (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) class, with 18 students, and I plan to cover course content and engage them by scheduling instruction and using online resources in the following way(s)….

I taught a class last semester as a flipped classroom. In addition to increased engagement with the students, it made the transition to remote much easier. I plan to continue the flipped structure in the fall, especially with the Quantitative Analysis class (CHM 221). The advantage of the flipped classroom, is to be able to group students to work together. This can be done with social distancing in place. The number of in person seats I will utilize will depend on room limits. This style can also easily accommodate multiple classrooms simultaneously and a remote class through Collaborate. The addition to this teaching style is a greater incorporation of the Quality Matters alignment principles. I had the opportunity to review a course that had all the online elements but had flaws with alignment between course and module objectives, materials and assignment, and student assessment. The course was difficult to navigate. Fixing the alignment problems made the online portion of the course more easily navigated. I plan to restructure my Blackboard site into modules that contain the relevant learning objectives through to the paired assessment.

Andrew Watkins

Computer Science & Engineering

This fall I’m teaching two Tuesday/Thursday classes, each with around 18 students. Both of these classes are problem-solving based courses that traditionally have been taught with lecture and student practice within the classroom and homework problem sets and larger projects outside of the classroom.

Much of the engagement in these classes comes from my ability to work with students on practice problems and clarify material misconceptions as we work through those problems together. This fall, I hope to re-create this level of engagement in a variety of ways. For my traditional lecture material, I plant to use short videos, readings, and other electronic resources to cover the main points.

I am also planning on making a series of problem-solving videos in which I demonstrate (or have found a video of someone else demonstrating) how to solve example problems of the topics we are covering. During class time, with what, I assume, will never be the entire class at once, I plan on interacting with a particular fraction of the students through my typical engagement with the problems.

Since not all of the class will be present for these sessions, I will make notes of the most common issues that I am seeing in these problem-solving sessions and distribute those notes through Blackboard after each class session. I’m hoping that there will be enough classroom space for each student to attend one of these sessions per week.

However, it may be that students can only attend one in-person session every three class days, which will provide more of a challenge. Regardless, during their in-person days, students will have the opportunity to ask me questions about the current lecture material and problems we are solving as well as interact with their classmates.

My plan is to make all of the content for a week available at the beginning of the week. Students can then work through that material in ways that work best for them; however, there will be an expectation of being prepared for their in-person class sessions by having worked through particular portions of the material prior to the in-person session.

In the event that we need to move the course into an entirely distant-based format, I will re-create this engagement through the use of Teams or Collaborate. I’m also planning on making liberal use of both breakout groups within collaborate as well as discussion boards on Blackboard to foster the classroom community and smaller-group problems solving that works well with my course material. In all scenarios, being available for video-conferencing, emails, chats, etc. will be another key to engaging the students. However, this is not really that different from the ways I have traditionally made sure to be available for students.

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