Skip to main content

Adventures with a hybrid class, Part I

This is the first of a series of three guest posts from Mary McGlasson of Chandler-Gilbert Community College.

PART I: What possessed me to undertake this video project?
Let me introduce myself – I am Dr. Mary McGlasson, Economics faculty (and faculty developer for emerging technologies) at Chandler-Gilbert Community College, one of ten sister colleges in the Maricopa District. Our college serves about 14,000 students annually, and student learning is at the heart of all that we do. One strategy that we have taken with our Economics courses is to offer a wide variety of modalities – traditional (16 week, face-to-face), compressed (8 week, face-to-face), online, and hybrid (a mix of face-to-face and online) – for students to choose from.

Seven years ago, I agreed to offer our college’s first hybrid Economics class. How hard could it be? After all, my face-to-face classes were already web-enhanced, heavily using the features of the Learning Management System (Blackboard, at the time). I would just lecture as usual, and direct them in online discussions and research in between our face-to-face sessions. To make a long story short, there was one word to sum up that first semester’s attempt: disaster. It was an utter, absolute, unmitigated disaster. The class just never gelled – I was unable to get the students to participate, interact, and collaborate in either the face-to-face sessions or the online arena. Half of the students dropped the class. I decided that maybe hybrid and I simply weren’t cut out for one another, and the following semester I went back to the traditional fully face-to-face delivery mode.

A couple of years later, my colleagues and I were still interested in offering hybrid courses, especially for the added scheduling flexibility it offered our students. Reflecting on my earlier failure, it was clear that many of the students who had taken the hybrid course didn’t know what they were getting into; from the schedule, they clearly thought that all they had to do was show up to class once a week instead of twice a week – doing work between sessions hadn’t occurred to many of them. That was the point at which I realized that with half the usual face time, I needed them to digest the lecture basics on their own, and use our precious face time for the active/collaborative learning components (yes, a year or two later the term "flipped classroom" became all the rage -- too bad I didn't realize it was going to be such a hot trend!).

How was I going to make the hybrid class model work for me and for my students? I needed to be sure that my students worked through the content on their own, or the face-to-face portion would be a total loss. Having them watch video content seemed ideal, but there just wasn’t much available. And so I started creating a series of my own Macro/Micro principles videos (which I now have posted on YouTube at http://youtube.com/mjmfoodie). I did NOT want to post any "talking head" videos of me standing in front of a camera lecturing about Economics, so I created the artwork — lots of stick people and the occasional sock monkey -- and used Windows Movie Maker (because it's free!) to create the series.  

This time, the hybrid model worked, and I have been teaching both Micro and Macro principles in this format for the last few years. In my end-of-semester evaluations, two of the questions I ask are:
  • “Would you take another hybrid class?” – the majority say highly likely/likely (on the last evaluation, out of 100 students, 3 students said “definitely not”).
  • “WHAT TYPE of class activity contributed most to your success and understanding of economics this semester?” – the majority of students say that the videos are the most useful.
While my intent was to use these videos for my own classes, much to my surprise, I have gotten correspondence from instructors and students from all over the world (163 countries, last time I checked…?) telling me how helpful these have been to them. The YouTube channel currently has close to 14,000 subscribers and 3,000,000 views. Who knew?





Comments

  1. I teach at a community college where attendance can be spotty for all sorts of reasons. I link to your videos each week for students who miss or need to see graphs done again. They love them as do I. Thanks for making them available.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

What are the costs?

I came across an interesting discussion about a 19-year-old intern who was fired from The Gazette in Colorado Springs for plagiarism. There appears to be some controversy over the fact that the editor publicly named the girl in a letter to readers (explaining and apologizing for the plagiarism), with some people saying that doing so was unduly harsh because this incident will now follow her for the rest of her career. I was intrigued by this discussion for two reasons - one, it seems pretty clear to me that this was not a case of ignorance (as I have often encountered with my own students who have no idea how to paraphrase or cite correctly) and two, putting aside the offense itself, I have often struggled with how to handle situations where there are long-term repercussions for a student, repercussions that lead the overall costs to be far higher than might seem warranted for the specific situation. As an example of the latter issue, I have occasionally taught seniors who need to p

What was your high school economics experience like?

As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu