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| http://www.ast.obs-mip.fr/users/donati/spirou/protodisc_small.jpg |
When the heavenly bodies are born, this happens out of a chaos of dust and gas and gravity. As microscopic bits of dust combine into bigger pieces, eventually a unified whole coalesces into a tangible object - a galaxy, a star, a planet, etc. And although the combining of these proto materials into bodies appear contained in an observable sphere, closer inspection reveals an increasingly complex subject the closer one looks. The universe is a collection of galaxies that are the coalescence of solar systems under a black hole's gravitational pull, and every solar system is a collection of stellar objects borne out of collections of vanishingly smaller materials - no less distinct on their own. Such, I contend, is also the nature of words (and most everything else). My undergrad philosophy professor always said, "if you want to know the definition of something, don't reach for a dictionary." He meant that the definitions in dictionaries are mere approximations, and that words are actually defined in social usage and best represented by a range of meanings. What a word "means" is really a touching of a seemingly endless number of other words.
The reason for this philosophical foray grows out of my recent experience speaking with MTSO's faculty in our one-on-one discussions. The Ed Tech taskforce was originally concerned with addressing ATS requirements for online classes, and so we set about establishing to what degree our courses are "online" and whether we needed to petition ATS for a review of our online program. The result was that ATS does not consider a class to be online unless 50% or more class time occurred online. Institutionally, therefore, we have designated a technologically augmented course as
hybrid so long as it meets this very simple criterion: courses with online work that does not account for more than 49% of the total class time are hybrid.
So there is the answer to the big question, "What is a hybrid course?" It is very simple and provides lots of room for interpretation as the nature of our online course offerings continue to coalesce. It also extend into the variety of ways that faculty choose to adopt technology for coursework. Some of the current strategies include:
- building module-based class resources which include lecture information and multimedia products (asynchronous)
- holding online class meetings using Adobe Connect or some other form of online meeting system (synchronous)
- using cloud-based service such as blogs, wiki's, discussion groups, or online media management solutions (this would include Sakai's online resources as well.
Of course, this list is always growing, and we are currently researching the ratio of translating residential seat-time to online time, but this will likely depend on the specific use of technology in each case. For example, spending one hour in an online class meeting will provide a more direct correlation to in-class seat time than time spent reading discussion group postings, and this still needs to be worked out. Ultimately, however, the important thing to note is that to some degree, most, if not all, of our courses are to some degree
hybrid, and we continue to consider the ways in which this can be expanded to facilitate the education of more commuting students, alleviate the pressures of condensed-time intensives, or allow for flexibility in scheduling to accommodate current and future student bodies.
