Colleges Aren’t Keeping Up With Student Demand for Hybrid Programs, Survey Suggests

Hybrid programs batter an institution’s efficiency as far as facilities utilization is concerned. A hybrid course requires a classroom for a few meetings but that time/day slot in the room is typically reserved for the entire semester (which leaves you with a mostly empty room). Unless there are lots of hybrid classes that have different on-campus meeting times so they can all be put in the same (or same few) classroom(s), utilization goes down – governing bodies, trustees and legislators don’t like underutilized classrooms. It’s a worse problem if the few sessions needed are in a computer lab. They’re much more scarce and typically more heavily utilized.

Until there’s some cooperation amongst those who demand their class be taught in “X” room on “Y” day at “Z” time, hybrid programs won’t gain favor by those who must explain empty classrooms.

Maybe I am just not into this new math, but since when does 33% constitute “many”? Take away the 19% that wanted it and already have it, and you only have 14% that want hybrid but aren’t getting it. Did they look in to why their colleges didn’t offer hybrid courses? Maybe the courses they were in also enrolled students from other countries, so hybrid is just not an option? I like the idea of hybrid, but you have to understand that hybrid courses take away the killer value of “any time, any where” learning from online courses. I wonder how many people wanted online courses but didn’t have that option? How many students are being “forced” to take face-to-face courses? How come we are not being told the rest of the statistics from this report? How many didn’t care what the format was? I suspect the majority are in this last category.

At my institution, the opposite is true regarding efficiency. Two classes can meet in the same physical space as two: since a typical class meets twice a week, the two hybrid classes meet once a week on alternate days in the traditional classroom. A competent registrar can figure this one out. When enrollments are high and space is truly valuable, in an urban campus for example, it isn’t even possible for faculty to have the type of control over teaching in X room on Y day, as you describe.

I completed my Master’s degree program entirely online, and it was the first time I really felt challenged in my academic career. The time that it takes to read and process other text postings is exactly what I needed. Face-to-face courses tend to bore me, mainly because the co-called “interaction” in those courses is limited to whoever can get the instructor’s attention. Entirely online programs work beautifully when they are designed properly. Of course, there are also completely face-to-face programs that are designed poorly – so design standards have nothing to do with whether it is online or not. But I couldn’t have ever completed my Masters if it wasn’t for wholly online programs. So I take issue with anyone that wants to write them off entirely. In some cases, they are better than face-to-face.

In my case, I have been looking for a PhD program that will provide a hybrid learning environment similar to the one offered at the University of Florida for their Classics program. Work is accomplished as a combination of online courses, short summer courses on campus and courses at other campuses around the country. I think schools are going to have to start going more in the direction of offering flexible options to people as to when and where they accomplish the requirements of their degrees, especially for peole who work full time but want to earn a graduate degree.

Experience and common sense reveals this. I have to remind our administration that to develop an online course, it would be akin to developing every talking point, handout, activity, etc… for every instructor teaching a brick and mortar course, which hardly anyone does. At best, most traditional instructors receive a syllabus and a book and they’re off. I don’t know too many instructors who script out there “lectures” or class sessions, but it’s a bit like that for an online course. Taking the screenplay to production so to speak. It’s time intensive! Unless of course all you are going to do is take a stack of lecture notes, throw them into the LMS, run some discussion boards and call it done. Which is obviously a terrible instructional model.

I enjoy teaching a blended course. Based on my recent experiences, students who actually attend are those who prefer to learn FTF and the rest complete their assignments online where they can view lectures. Compared to the online version I sometimes offer, the students (and the teacher) get the best of both worlds, flexibility and an opportunity to engage those who want to attend. Forcing students to attend is only justified if the lecture material is not online. The idea that all students learn by discussion is naive. Yes, the students who would have opted-in for a FTF blended class do learn better FTF, but the ones who don’t want to be there just “bring down the room.” I’m glad they slept in and I don’t mind not seeing them (nor should I mind giving them good grades if they complete all the assigned work in absentia). Blended courses are NOT for everyone, but I surely prefer them to traditional (or online) courses.

Glad you liked your degree. My institution has hired a number of holders of online doctorates from a variety of for-profit universities as faculty. Our experience has not been very happy. These people were poorly trained and taught. One guy is struggling with his dissertation while his online advisor lives five miles down the road but refuses to meet face to face. Now that is great service. So instead, the forlorn doctoral has dragooned a reference librarian with a real PhD to help him. Lucky for him that the library director has not put his foot down about reference service being morphed into freeloading doctoral supervision. I had to do an interview survey with the student and the questions were simplistic to ridiculous. This is not an isolated instance either as we have hired about a dozen and not a single success story.

You can build that kind of efficiency into your own schedule as well. I will teach two hybrid courses in the fall, one on Monday and one on Wednesday, same time, same classroom. Couldn’t be easier.

Is there an online “meeting place” or resource where students, instructors, technical admin, and academic admin can acquire information about best practices or a listing of schools with effective hybrid and blended courses? If not, this might be a great opportunity for individual pioneers across academe to collaborate and generate a knowledge base.

I can see the value in a having a creditable source to share opportunities, challenges, and well researched information about introducing, supporting, and maintaining these kinds of courses. (Sorry, I’m a serial comma junkie.)

Absolutely. Also, just because people say they want something, doesn’t meant they will actually take it if provided.

1)
Managing by EVENTS took off 55 years ago in corporate America and later Nordic Europe. This is delivery of management functions by protocols in workshops inside mass workshop events wherein 200 to 2000 people over a two or three-day 10-hours-a-day format, create individual workshop products that combine at the end into impressive overall products.

Indeed, most corporate learning is now transmitted via such events—Learning-by-EVENTS: Phone Research Labs, Problem Finding Work-outs, Cause-Finding Work-Outs, Solution-Finding Work-Outs etc.

2)
Colleges for some utterly stupid reason use instead CLASSES as a vehicle of learning—stupid stupid stupid—the web out-performs classes by orders of magnitude.

3)
Corporations use TWO process form, BOTH missing entirely from dowdy lazy sloppy dishonest (Harvard) universities;
a) process weaves—-emediated process flows PUNCTUATED with mass workshop EVENTS
b) pulsed systems—rhythms of engagement with disengagement, sameness with difference, local with global—so that mere addition of connectedness is not allowed to destroy all creativity.

All universities have to do is compete with learning already in place everywhere in the world OTHER than at dowdy greed generating universities.

I think hybrids can be an effective way to combine the best of two learning modes. For instance, we have a number of graduate students who cannot afford to be away from jobs, families, etc. for a term to study at one of our international campuses in Europe or Asia. By offering a hybrid “Commerce in China” course, we are able to allow them the opportunity to study abroad, visit corporate entities in China, learn about doing business there, and more, and by using the hybrid model (online learning with a week based in China) students worldwide -from our many campuses as well as our online programs – can participate.

Hybrid programs are the future. They make use of the amazing advances in technology today. If schools fail to see that they will be damaging themselves.

Sal Pellettieri,
http://Enterthegroup.com

Privacy rules do so much more than protect privacy!

Flagrant violations, like “coercive efforts to obtain e-mail addresses”, serve as “gate-keepers” for the lecture itself –on the part of the sponsor, not the “left-oriented voices”!– selecting in favor of an audience willing to provide such information to the sponsor, and discouraging attendance by anyone not willing to do so.
Despicable.

Part of the experience that any U wants for its students is to freely attend lectures just like this, to get them thinking, as you say.

(They just might even think up questions, like, oh idunno:
Wasn’t “much of the misery of the Middle Ages” due to the fact that all commons, fields, farms, and everything else were, in fact, the “well-specified individual property” of a tiny aristocracy?)

According to Inside Higher Ed students were not asked for their e-mails at the lecture or immediately before or immediately after the lecture.  (There wasn’t a sign-up table, for example, in the lobby outside the auditorium or a sign-up clipboard in the auditorium.)  Instead, the Koch Foundation directly contacted the College and asked for the College to provide the e-mails of any students who attended:

“Faculty members started to get worried when they heard that the
foundation, as part of its grant, asked for the e-mail addresses of
students who attended the lecture. Faculty members objected to the idea
that a funder was entitled to know which students attended and to get
private information, such as their e-mail addresses.  Ruth Wardwell, a
college spokeswoman (to whom faculty members also referred inquiries),
confirmed that the foundation asked for the students’ e-mail addresses,
but said that Whitman didn’t provide them. She also said that the
college hasn’t decided whether to honor the request of faculty members
not to seek additional Koch money.” http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/22/whitman-college-faculty-question-koch-foundation-grant#ixzz1fkpevjSP

(Note: I have trouble believing colleges are asking students to swipe their ID cards when they go to lectures on campus these days.  Why would the Koch Foundation even think that this data was readily available?)

I have no problem with the college bringing a Koch-funded speaker on campus.  The college should bring on campus speakers of all political and ideological persuasions.  But the college is right not to sell or provide the e-mails of students to outside grantors (or anyone for that matter).  If the Koch Foundation wants to recruit students, faculty, or staff, they should be allowed to come on campus or set up a booth near campus.  (Or I suppose they could ask the speakers they sponsor to provide foundation contact info as part of a program flyer or on a PowerPoint slide.)

Did I miss something?  Aren’t email addresses part of directory information under FERPA?  What’s so wrong about passing them along to a grantor – whether or not they want just the list of students who attended or not?  What activities you participate in is also possible directory information under FERPA.  

Of all the things a person could get all worked up about, giving an email address to a grantor hardly seems worth the bother.  So you have to delete some spam now and again…big deal.  My university sold my email address to freakin’ everybody they could find to buy it.  Heck, most students have at least two email addresses…

Would everyone be so upset if it was anyone other than Koch?  Say, if Obabma gave a talk and wanted to know who came, and their email addresses?

And what if they want them to do an effectiveness study with the students?  Can hardly blame them for wanting to cut the college out of the middle of something like that…

“Did I miss something?  Aren’t email addresses part of directory information under FERPA?”

While email addresses may or may not be directory information, depending on the institution’s definition of directory information, the identifcation of students who attended the lecture is not. FERPA would prohibit the disclosure of the email addresses tied to the identity of the students attending the lecture – assuming, as others have noted, that the institution had records of who attended the lecture.

The issue for me is that Vedder and his colleague Peter Wood only seem to want diversity when it come to conservative voices. When others are pushing for more Black or brown voices (or women for that matter), Vedder and Wood start ranting about the free market of ideas and yada yada.

The free market argument here is that the students are the customers. And they are making their choices know about what they want their institution supporting (and yes, it may have been an outside funder, but I’m pretty sure the institution had to pay for stuff like electricity, security, custodial, etc. 

Your not really playing fair with the “free market of ideas” when your idea has a bigger bank account then mine.

Actually, participation in activities is part of directory information (http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/pdf/ferpafaq.pdf):
What is “Directory Information”?FERPA defines “directory information” as information contained in the education records of a student that would not generally be considered harmful or an invasion of privacy if disclosed.  Typically, “directory information” includes information such as name, address, telephone listing, date and place of birth, participation in officially recognized activities and sports, and dates of attendance.  A school may disclose “directory information” to third parties without consent if it has given public notice of the types of information which it has designated as “directory information,” the parent’s or eligible student’s right to restrict the disclosure of such information, and the period of time within which a parent or eligible student has to notify the school in writing that he or she does not want any or all of those types of information designated as “directory information.”  The means of notification could include publication in various sources, including a newsletter, in a local newspaper, or in the student handbook.  The school could also include the “directory information” notification as part of the general notification of rights under FERPA.  The school does not have to notify a parent or eligible student individually.  (34 CFR § 99.37.)

The lecture would be “participation in officially recognized activities”, in my opinion.  Whether or not they keep records would be an entirely different matter – although one might argue that they should be keeping records.  This kind of thing is a great measure of student engagement.  And, at least at our institution, all of these kinds of things should have learning outcomes for the students in attendance.  Part of that whole pesky “accountability” initiative…those annoying taxpayers seem to think the institution should be spending their money wisely…