Group items tagged

Hybrid learning is going to be the instructional medium of the (very near) future. Students will be spending more time receiving content instruction in an online capacity and then working with a local teacher who will perform a facilitator role rather than imparting content knowledge onto students.

Blended, or hybrid, learning has caught the eye of many looking into the potential of online learning, especially after the release of a meta-analysis and review of online-learning research by the U.S. Department of Education in May 2009. The authors found that "instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage" than either purely online or entirely face-to-face instruction.

The course management system (CMS) reinforces the status quo and hinders substantial teaching and learning innovation in higher education. It does so by imposing artificial time limits on learner access to course content and other learners, privileging the role of the instructor at the expense of the learner, and limiting the power of the network effect in the learning process. The open learning network (OLN)-a hybrid of 1 the CMS and the personal learning environment (PLE)-is proposed as an alternative learning technology environment with the potential to leverage the affordances of the Web to dramatically improve learning.

This course, with 36 undergraduates, was one of twenty-five new interdisciplinary courses approved by my institution to address "new problems" facing society and to experiment with new teaching and learning strategies. The goals of the class are to use and evaluate various social media in the contexts of information production, sharing, consumption, teaching, and learning. Since the course is open to all majors, one of my goals as a journalism professor is to tap a diverse group of students to gain a better understanding of how digital information and social media are utilized in different disciplines. This "hybrid" course combines class meetings with the use of more than ten different social media tools during the 12-week semester. Some tools take the place of more traditional teaching methods such as papers and written exams.

The tools we discuss below can be embedded into any open source LMS and down the road we plan to revisit other platforms.

At exactly this moment, online education is poised (and threatening) to replicate the conditions, courses, structures, and hierarchical relations of brick-and-mortar industrial-era education. Cathy N. Davidson argued exactly this at her presentation, "Access Demands a Paradigm Shift," at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference. The mistake being made, I think, is a simple and even understandable one, but damning and destructive nonetheless. Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we've helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. None of these, though, map promisingly into digital space. If we continue to tread our current path, we'll be left with a Frankenstein's monster of what we now know of education. This is the imminent destruction of our educational system of which so many speak: taking an institution inspired by the efficiency of post-industrial machines and redrawing it inside the machines of the digital age. Education rendered into a dull 2-dimensional carbon copy, scanned, faxed, encoded and then made human-readable, an utter lack of intellectual bravery.

Great advice and tips for using the "Flipped" model