Hybrid Courses

Since the Internet has grown to be a tool for education, many schools and universities are looking to create hybrid classes.  Since there is more than one form of the hybrid class, I looked at this course and UW Milwaukee's hybrid courses to compare hybrid styles.

For UW Milwaukee, hybrid courses have one of the following formats:

1. There are in person lectures and discussions with online assignments.

2. There are online lectures and assignments with in person discussions.

3. Students prepare a presentation online and present it in person.

LIS201 is the same format as UW Milwaukee's first format.  I think Milwaukee is smart to experiment with different formats.  Over time, they will find which format works better.  However, I feel, with some bias, that the LIS201 format is the best.  I feel that it is easier to communicate ideas in  person.  Discussing in person is essential because people communicate ideas not only in words, but in body language and tone.  Without these signs, people may not be able to understand the ideas or opinions people are presenting.

Also, students must participate in live lectures.  By being asked questions and receiving feedback, students know whether or not they understand the content.  This also helps the professor understand what points need to be articulated and what points are understood.

Online assignments force students to complete their work in a timely manor.  Since there is a time stamp on any online assignment, students are forced to have there work completed before coming to class.  This ensures that students understand, or at least have some knowledge, on the topic before coming to class.

I personally, prefer classes with less online features.  I like knowing that my deadline is the start of class.  That way I remember when the work must be completed by.  However, I understand that online assignments makes the process easier in that papers are not lost and turn in time is clearly stated.  Therefore, I would prefer fewer hybrids, but I would still take them if the course was interesting.  I feel that UW Madison will add more hybrid courses in the years to come.

I feel LIS201 has changed the way I see technology and the information society.  It wasn't until this course that I realized that many technologies are similar by aiding communication.  I feel that knowing this has allowed me to compare many technologies in my life and understand them better.  I feel that the activities we have done have strengthened this feeling.  Using the Internet to discuss these topics put into practice what we where discussing.  For this reason, I understand and support LIS201 being a hybrid course.

Hybrid Courses

In my search for hybrid courses at other higher education institutes, I found that the University of Wisconsin-Madison does not stand alone. In searching only for "hybrid courses", I came across a multitude of schools that offer these course packages, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, University of Washington-Bothell, and even a variety of community colleges, such as Northern Virginia Community College, and Ozarks Technical Community College. For the most part, it seems that the use of hybrid courses in the other schools are for the most part on par with the one that we've experienced in LIS201 at UW-Madison. NOVA (Northern Virginia Community College) describes the hybrid theory as a combination of in-person/face-to-face communication with online instruction taking place within one single course.
In my own experience with the hybrid theory of education, I think that the intention may be better than the actual outcome, at least for now. While I definitely understand the importance of an online presence, I think that it can sometimes be a bit unnecessary or at least ineffective. I think that as a student I get much more out of the activity itself, what I'm learning, and less out of the fact that it takes place online. I think that I may learn a bit more out of the physical space than the virtual one - a virtual space contains too much potential for distraction. I think that the more the Internet is used as a place for education (especially once it becomes the exclusive place for education with online-only courses, for example), the more of a risk is in place for distraction.
The question on whether an online course taking place for a class that doesn't revolve around the importance of the Internet and technology is an interesting one, and I'm honestly not quite sure what the answer is. I think that until I experience it, I wouldn't be able to say for sure. The use of the Internet in an Internet-based course means that I pay particular attention to not only what the assignment is, but how the Internet is helpful in achieving it. In a course that doesn't discuss the Internet's weight, I'm not sure that the latter would be as present in my research.

Hybrid courses

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.

The Hybrid Course

After doing a search for specific "Hybrid" courses, I was unable to find any specific courses that were considered "hybrid". I was only able to find Universities that had descriptions to "hybrid" courses and how that they offered some classes that fit this criteria, but no specific classes. These descriptions that I found fit our hybrid class and they have the same approach. This shows that "hybrid" courses are becoming more popular because they are utilizing today's technology and are taking part of the course online.

I think that these "hybrid" and "blended" course approaches are good approaches and help the educational process. While traditional in-person learning works, I think that taking part of the course online takes the learning experience to the next level. While in-person learning allows for learning, I think that the online portion allows the student to take these skills they learned and apply them in a more modern and different approach. I think that this approach is going to become more popular and will be seen more frequently in universities and schools as time goes on and technology advances.

From my own experience, I felt that the online portions connected with the in-person portions. However, I felt that I was a more effective student in physical space. I felt that with the online assignments and the online portion of this class, I was not able to fully express myself and get my voice across, but I felt I was able to in-person and in our discussions. I think that I was able to learn more from the in-person portion of our class because I felt that even though the online assignments allowed us to explore what we learned, it was more just answering the questions and being done with it. I was always an in-person and old school learning student, as I still take notes with a notebook and a pencil. However, I think that the online portion was very interesting and gave the course a different perspective that allowed us to use the skills and knowledge we learned and apply it to technology and what our generation is used to.

I think that the course material was able to go well with the hybrid idea because of how the course material was about the information society. Information has always been spread, and it is spreading at an even faster rate with new technology. Because of this, I think that incorporating technology into our learning and our class was a great idea. I felt that I was able to have hands-on experience and apply what we learned to these online portions. I think that this hybrid course would not work very well with a course like mathematics, because it would just make things complicated. If the course material deals with technology, I think a hybrid course would work for that specific course.

Overall, I think that the online portion of our LIS 201 class was very interesting and gave the class and my learning experience a different perspective. I liked how our class was a "hybrid" class and would like to have more classes like this in the future.

Hybrid Courses

In today's information society, it is becoming increasingly common for schools to offer hybrid courses for their students. Instead of consisting solely of a lecture and discussion or existing only online, this new type of course makes use of both online and offline aspects to enhance the learning experience. After some brief searching online, I found that this is not an uncommon practice among universities. Many pages came up in my results from websites of various universities explaining exactly what a hybrid course is. These schools involved names such as UW-Milwaukee, Northern Virginia Community College, the University of Washington-Bothell, and others. Though these schools may have explained the concept slightly differently, they all followed the same general pattern: all of them said that hybrid courses make use of both online and offline components to create a new learning environment for students.

As for our own hybrid course, LIS 201, I found that the online components helped a lot in showing concepts that were discussed in the classroom in a more traditional manner. Whenever we talked about a concept in class, it was followed up with a relevant activity to do online that further displayed that concept and helped me to better understand the course material. While I did find the online component of the course to be helpful and effective, I also felt that the face-to-face interaction with other students is what was most helpful to my learning. It allowed me to discuss a concept more in-depth with a person and then supplement that discussion with an online activity. Overall, though, I learned a lot from the online part of this course. In addition to elaborating on concepts discussed in class, it also taught me how to effectively use a variety of different online resources like blogs. I would say that in the future, the UW should definitely make use of online components in more classes, but also take care to make sure that the online aspects of the courses do not eclipse the in-person ones. While online parts of a hybrid course can greatly supplement class discussions, it is difficult for them to completely replace those discussions, especially since there are so many different learning styles among people.

In the overall course of LIS 201, I feel that course lectures and readings have helped me to see more and better perspectives of my own online experiences. This didn't just happen while I was doing our weekly online activities, either. The class materials and discussions made me more conscious of exactly what I was doing online and what that meant for the information society. They made me consider what possible strengths and weaknesses accompany our new information technologies in our ever-changing world. I do think, however, that this would be different in a class that isn't focused completely on the vast world of information that exists online. Instead, the online components of the course would make students conscious of other things in their lives and how that course's material affects everything they do, both online and offline, in their everyday lives.

Hybrid Courses in an Information (Internet) Society

When I searched for hybrid courses I had a hard time finding specific classes, but I found various schools that offered them throughout the country. Most of the information was very general, explaining the concept of a "hybrid" or "blended" class, and some gave their opinion on why these classes were beneficial.

The hybrid classes at UW-Milwaukee seemed to be most similar to the format of LIS 201. Some of the other colleges like Oklahoma and Northeastern University seemed to describe online courses that were supplemented with the occasional face-to-face classroom time. They often met a lot less often, maybe once a month or a few times in a semester. UW-Milwaukee's page about hybrid classes says, "A hybrid course is designed to integrate face-to-face and online activities so that they reinforce, complement, and elaborate one another, instead of treating the online component as an add-on or duplicate of what is taught in the classroom."

Even after learning so much about the Internet in our FIG, I feel that I benefit more from face-to-face interaction in the classroom. I think that it is really important to be able to talk concepts through to fully understand them. On the blog and wiki we can try to explain concepts, and sometimes we can have discussion through the comments. But we do not feed off each others' online activities in the same way that we do in the classroom.  However, I think the blog posts made up for some of the things that didn't get said in discussion. Sometimes we don't have enough time to fully discuss everything or people are quiet because they either can't think of anything to say on the spot or don't want to share. So the blog is a way for people to share their ideas more cohesively. I was already familiar and comfortable with blogger before this class, but I definitely feel more comfortable with wikis now. I think that we could have even used the wiki more, and I think that there are different courses that would benefit from using the wiki to post assignments. UW-Madison professors should really consider incorporating blogs into their instruction, because it is extremely helpful to have resources that we can use and the assignments explicity explained in one place. I didn't have to question what I was supposed to do, because everything was laid out on the blog. There are other classes that I forget exactly what the instructor wanted us to do, and that makes it difficult to complete the assignment.

The blog really connected with all of the classes in our FIG. It made me think about the reading about blogs and hyperlinks in LIS 201, and we had several readings on the same topic in CA 346. We also talked about Web 2.0 in both LIS 301 and CA 346, and bloggers are part of the user-generated content frenzy associated with Web 2.0. I feel like a blog on subjects other than the Internet could still function in similar terms, the posts would just be a lot less about the process of collecting information and researching, and more about the content of the class.

Overall, I really enjoyed the "hybrid" aspect of this class. I can't imagine a class about the Internet and the Information Society without some incorporation of online activities.

Forms of Hybrid Courses

For this assignment, I decided to search for "hybrid" courses that are similar to LIS 201 in some way, whether they contain similar content or a major online component. First I found "hybrid" courses at UW-Milwaukee. My search led me to their main Hybrid Courses page. The main thing I noticed was the focus on various class' online elements. By definition, UW-Milwaukee states, "In 'hybrid' classes, a significant amount of the course learning activity has been moved online, making it possible to reduce the amount of time spent in the classroom. Traditional face-to-face instruction is reduced but not eliminated" [source].

While this kind of online component is similar to that of LIS 201, its purpose is not the same. These courses contain more instruction online than they do offline. We use online components to practice our skills with blogs and wikis, all while working toward becoming more competent with technology in our age of an increasing reliance on technology. However, not every hybrid course in every university is designed with its online component for the sake of increasing students' abilities to navigate through and communicate with online course work. For example, Advanced Nursing Practice Interventions focuses on diagnoses, interventions, and patient care. Therefore, there are other universities that use the "hybrid/blended" approach with its classes, but sometimes it is simply for the sake of convenience; students don't have to go to a physical classroom to receive instruction.

I really liked the combination of online and in-person portions of this class. While at first I had my doubts about all of the online components as I didn't have any experience with blogs or other similar online spaces, I felt as though it was a very efficient and effective way to complete assignments and act as a primary work platform for the class. I found it very effective to actually use the different kinds of technology we were talking about in order to complete our assignments.

That being said, I think I was a more effective student in the virtual world. While I found in-person discussions to be helpful and beneficial, I usually participated more in online settings. The ability to provide links, pictures, and personal entries helped me learn more about the information society. Throughout the semester, I began to adapt to all of the online elements and concluded that they were much more exciting and personalized experiences as opposed to activities in a traditional classroom setting. Granted, I learned more from my fellow classmates offline than I did online. However, I did get to learn a lot about their writing styles and it was interesting to see their takes on the same assignments that I was doing.

This class has taught me much more than the history and functionality of the information society. Now, I am much more confident with various kinds of technology and online spaces. I had never written in a blog before this class, nor had I any experience with any kind of online forum outside of social media sites. The assigned readings, especially the articles from the last few weeks, have been interesting and have caused me to relate various topics to my own life. Articles that dealt with Google, the NSA, and our new media generation were very applicable to my own personal life. I think that this heavy of an online focus would work best in a class similar to LIS 201 that deals with online information collaboration/communication. Classes with other objective, scientific, or mathematical focuses may not have the same kind of beneficial impact on students. Overall I enjoyed the "hybrid" nature of this course and will look for classes with similar layouts in the future.