While doing my search on hybrid courses I had a lot of similar findings to my classmates. When I first started my search I mostly found information about the idea of hybrid/ blended courses. A lot of it was how to manage them so they were effective, and other such research. Later on though, I started to find more links that continued to take me to Harper College's course selection guide. After doing some search into this, I found that they actually have a quite large selection of hybrid courses. These were in different areas too, so a chemist and a journalist both had an opportunity to experience this. What I did not find though was the description of how these blended courses would work. All of them had the general course description then at the bottom it would say "Blended:Online AND oncampus Instructional Method," so it is not very specific as to what one can expect out of these courses in terms of them being blended.
LIS 201 though was, I think, was different from Harper College's in that Proffessor Downey did a very good job explaining what a blended course was and what we could expect both online, through the blog, and in class. Another thing I liked about the course were the Wiki's and blogs. Since we already spend so much time on the computer I think having assignments and means of communication online made it a lot easier for us to do the tasks assigned. This also made us helped us to use our computer time more effectively and in a more interesting way, such as spending 30 minutes researching and writing about the Memex than being on Facebook.
One of the things I did not like about this course being blended though is that a lot of the teaching that went on was not really teaching. I felt it was more us finding the answers by ourselves, but this may also be a good thing as well. A topic such as The Information Society is not really something one can really learn about, but has to really think about and observe in the real world around us.
For the reason mentioned, I think that the fact this course is blended is really helpful, because the internet and online communication and publishing tools really help add to the meaning of the content. In other courses, such as math, though I don't really think they would be as effective, because face-to-face communication and teaching is more important in helping students understand.
1 comment:
I agree that having online activities was a good idea for this course, but I was less productive because my assignments were online. I often became distracted by other sites and tried to avoid the assignments. So although I spent 30 minutes on the blogs, I spent 2 hours on Facebook, Youtube, etc.
I also liked that we were answering our own questions. I feel that we cannot deeply analyze information by being told that the answer is strictly one thing. I feel that it is our obligation as students to try to answer our own questions.
I agree that face to face communication is very important, although I feel it is important for every course. I believe people can understand each other better through communicating in person.
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