Academic
Exchange Quarterly Winter 2010
ISSN 1096-1453 Volume 14, Issue 4
To
cite, use print source rather than this on-line version which may
not reflect print copy
format requirements or text
lay-out and pagination.
|
This
article should not be reprinted for inclusion in any publication for sale
without author's explicit permission. Anyone may view, reproduce or store
copy of this article for personal, non-commercial use as allowed by the
"Fair Use" limitations (sections 107 and 108) of the U.S. Copyright
law. For any other use and for reprints, contact article's author(s) who may
impose usage fee.. See also |
Hybridity in an Independent
Writing Program
Joannah Portman-Daley, University of Rhode Island
Jeremiah Dyehouse, University of Rhode
Island
Michael Pennell, University of Rhode Island
Portman-Daley is a doctoral student in
Writing & Rhetoric, Dyehouse, Ph.D., is Associate
Professor of Writing & Rhetoric, and Pennell, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor
of Writing & Rhetoric.
Abstract
This article investigates an independent writing
program’s experimental move towards a hybrid course environment for its
first-year writing courses. It examines two instructors’ approaches to
hybridizing the same course, offering insight into the necessity of designing a
hybrid course through an “online-centric” model. In addition, the impact such a
transition has on various aspects of student learning, including engagement and
outcomes assessment, is explored through a third instructor’s institutional
perspective.
Introduction
In his book on
technology and educational constructivism, Reality by Design, Joseph Petraglia argues that students' perceptions of "authentic"
or meaningful learning derive from students' own judgments about their learning
experiences, and not, he argues, from "characteristics inherent in a
learning situation" (131). Primarily, Petraglia
is arguing that educators ought to stop trying to "preauthenticate"
learning technologies (or, put more generally, to give up the quest for
"perfect" educational tools). At the end of his book, Petraglia suggests that educators can view educational
tools as part of a larger rhetorical situation in which educators interact with
learners. The opportunity to be seized in such situations is that of
persuading learners that their learning is "authentic" in some way,
or, at the very least, that it may be meaningful for them. Reframing learning
as a communicative act, Petraglia holds out the
possibility that educational technologies can help educators persuade students
that what they are doing is meaningful.
We rely on Petraglia’s framing of learning as communicative act as we
reflect on a Spring 2010 teaching initiative involving the implementation of a
hybrid-teaching environment for two first-year writing courses. Specifically,
we investigate this initial move towards hybridity
through the concept of “engagement.” Such a concept is central to our
department’s student learning outcomes and offers a lens through which to
examine the communicative act of learning—or authenticity of a learning
situation—and its relation to student learning outcomes. As Petraglia
warns, educators must be sensitive to the rhetorical situation of hybrid
courses, wary of a disposition to preauthenticate the
situation based on characteristics supposedly inherent in the tools of hybridity, such as course management software. In our
effort to avoid such a tools-based approach, we agree with Catherine Gouge that
we “are already, to some extent, teaching and administering hybrid courses”
(357). Indeed, many of us teaching in traditional classes regularly use email,
discussion boards, etc. to supplement our face-to-face teaching practices. And so,
we would argue that the technological is a pedagogical and curricular pressure
already—it is never just technology.
The trend of pedagogical hybridity—or moving parts of face-to-face classes online—has been growing rapidly over the last few years, at a rate that “surpasses the 1.2% growth of the overall student population in higher education” (Tan, Wang, and Xiao 117).
However, as Richard Wilson’s 2008 study
illustrates, while hybrid environments prove generally beneficial to student
performance, success is dependant on course specific teaching strategies (244).
In particular, the delivery selection of certain elements—which ones to put
online and which ones to deliver face-to-face—can be a considerable challenge,
one that should be handled with detailed attention not only to the specific
course at hand, but also to the specific instructor and group of students (see
Wilson; Boora et al). Ideally, the curricular and technological must work together to
maintain the balancing act operating behind the delivery of a
curriculum—ideally when in sync, we don’t notice they are there.
In what follows, we
explore our situated and specific challenges through feedback instructors
Portman-Daley and Dyehouse received from students in
their two hybrid writing courses. Within this discussion, we also point to
lessons learned from this pedagogical experiment and how they will impact
future hybrid teaching situations through the perspective of instructor
Pennell’s work with student outcomes. First, however, we describe the
first-year writing course and how it is situated within our Writing &
Rhetoric curriculum to provide context for our specific push towards hyrbidity.
The Course and the Hybrid Experiment
First-year composition
is not our main focus in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at our
northeastern land grant university. When we think about curriculum, we think
first of our "vertical," advanced writing curriculum and our major in
Writing and Rhetoric (see Miles, et al.). This said, we relish teaching
challenges, and so we have also devised three different first-year writing
courses that we see as one of our main contributions to general education at
our university. While the University requires none of these three courses, some
departments require their majors to take one of them. The course we hybridized
in the spring 2010 semester was WRT 104, "Writing to Inform and
Explain."
"Writing to Inform
and Explain" is a genre-based course with a rhetoric component, and it has
the largest enrollment of the three first-year courses; it is taught by a range
of instructors, from incoming graduate student TAs to full-time faculty. The
most central component of the course is genre instruction: identification,
practice, and production in five well-known genres—the "literacy
narrative," "rhetorical analysis," "informative
report," "argument," and "profile." The next component
is the portfolio approach. Our instructors coach students on their drafts
throughout the term, offering only low-stakes assessments of students' written
reflections, their demonstrations of their writing process, their participation
in peer review activities, and their draft's potential for inclusion in a final
portfolio. This final portfolio, which includes a reflective introduction
and only a few well-polished entries, is worth usually 40% of the student's
final grade. Peer (or writing) review, the course's last major
component, engages students in collaborative work to understand genres, to
improve drafts, and to engage more fully in writing as a process.
"Writing to Inform
and Explain" is not designed to inspire learners. Put another way,
it doesn’t explicitly seek to offer "authentic" learning of the sort
so earnestly sought by educational constructivists and others. As we tell
our students, the course is more like going to the gym than competing on the
field—it's about training to become a better writer, not showing how good you
already are. Students do have a great deal of autonomy, however,
especially as a result of the portfolio approach, which usually helps them to
become more invested in the course.
At the request of the
Chair of our department, Portman-Daley and Dyehouse
designed and taught two “hybrid” sections of "Writing to Inform and
Explain" in the Spring 2010 semester. In the experiment, they shared
a classroom; Dyehouse taught his section on Tuesdays,
and Portman-Daley taught her section on Thursdays, and the groups
"met" online when they didn't meet for class. Our university has recently invested in Sakai
for course management support; online classes were conducted through various
Sakai functionalities. Since Instructor
Pennell was involved in the decision-making of the university’s Sakai
investment and regularly leads workshops to aid instructors, Writing &
Rhetoric had an early and perhaps more advanced foothold on how to use Sakai in
seemingly constructive ways, or so we thought.
The point of this
experiment was to gauge the feasibility of offering more or perhaps all of our
first year courses on a "hybrid" format. As experienced
instructors with extensive technology experience, Portman-Daley and Dyehouse were to gauge the difficulty of teaching a hybrid
course for instructors who would be most likely to succeed. The next
phase of the experiment will be to assess the difficulties that new and/or more
traditional teachers are likely to experience in the "hybrid“ environment;
as noted, a range of instructors teach first-year writing at our university.
As a part of Dyehouse’s experimentation with the University’s efforts to
develop a "hybrid" first year writing course, he asked the
University's Office of Student Learning, Outcomes Assessment, and Accreditation
(SLOAA) to help him understand the experimental hybrid course. In his
case, the acting director, Bob Shea, collected some surveys from his students
and followed up with a focus group session, in which he sought to probe some of
the results he got from the surveys. Portman-Daley distributed informal
questionnaires to her students at the end of the semester. The following discussion
is based on these survey, focus group, and questionnaire results.
Two Approaches to the Course
Portman-Daley and Dyehouse did not use the same hybrid course design. Dyehouse opted for a conservative design, which extended
the traditional course into the University's course management system with very
little alteration in teaching strategy. Portman-Daley took a more
experimental—and, we believe, more successful—approach wherein she specifically
structured face-to-face classes to support online ones. Ultimately, we think
that Portman-Daley’s choice to pursue an online-centric model led to a course
in which her students had less practical difficulty with the course and in
which they found more academic challenge. This, we can argue, led to more
"engagement" on their part.
A first point of
comparison between the two course designs concerns the practical difficulty of
the courses. For our purposes here, we distinguish students' perceptions
of practical difficulty from perceptions of academic challenge (discussed
below). In particular, under the heading of practical difficulties, we
mean students' difficulties with understanding the course's pedagogical
methods, with completing assigned work, and with interacting with course
technologies.
Dyehouse's
students struggled to understand the course's expectations, and they found
certain online learning activities (especially online writing or
"peer" review) difficult to complete. Mid-term student surveys
and an end-of-semester focus group session revealed that Dyehouse's
students didn't understand the course's portfolio approach in particular, and
that they didn't believe that they had been prepared effectively for reviewing
their peers' work online. Comparing these results with his experiences
teaching non-hybrid courses, Dyehouse attributes
these failures to limitations on class time imposed by the hybrid model.
In previous semesters, Dyehouse had more time to
explain the course's approach and to coach writing reviewers, for
instance. He did not anticipate this
challenge in the hybrid environment and so did not structure his in-class
schedule to accommodate it.
Portman-Daley's students
did not indicate that they faced significant practical difficulties with the
course. Portman-Daley attributes the low levels of practical
difficulty her students expressed to her course's focus on the online learning
environment. For instance, anticipating reading comprehension problems from a
previous hybrid teaching experience, Portman-Daley structured her in-class
schedule to accommodate them; she moved in-class invention and arrangement
activities online and set aside classroom time for the explanation of project
components, the course's method, and concepts and activities to be explored in
the online environment. As a result, students found their face-to-face
sessions fast-paced and useful. As one student noted in an end-of-semester
survey, “Every time our class met, we did something productive.”
Academically, as a focus
group session revealed, Dyehouse’s students found the
course to be less challenging than they had expected. Portman-Daley’s students,
by contrast, reported a high level of academic challenge. Nearly all of
them claimed they were held more accountable by the hybrid platform. Not only
were they expected to stay current with what was due and when, but also the
course's requirement that students post all reading assignments to the Sakai
forum improved their attention to readings. As one student stated,
"I couldn't just walk into class without reading and hide in the back of
the room...it can be seen whether or not we did the readings.” Another student
compared his hybrid 104 experience to a friend’s traditional face-to-face 104
experience, arguing that he believed the online component of the class made him
“do more work, which made [him] learn more.” Unlike Dyehouse,
Portman-Daley made online learning count for 25% of her students’ semester
grade, a move she believes motivated them to complete the online assignments
more rigorously.
Based on the different
experiences with practical difficulty and academic challenge that Dyehouse's and Portman-Daley's students reported, we
believe that Portman-Daley's students were more engaged in her course.
Measures of participation in the courses' online environments tend to
corroborate this thesis. For instance, Dyehouse's
students participated much less frequently in the online course
environment. Despite the fact that Dyehouse had
his students complete all of the course's peer or writing review assignments in
the online environment, Dyehouse's students both
visited the environment and contributed to discussion forums less frequently
than Portman-Daley's. Specifically, Dyehouse's
22 students visited the course environment only 1511 times (68 times per
student) over the course of the semester (as opposed to Portman-Daley's 19
students, who visited 2893 times (152 times per student – more than twice Dyehouse’s).
In addition, Dyehouse's students authored fewer posts in the online
course environment's "forums." Dyehouse's
students averaged 37.9 authored posts per student in his section's discussion
forums (as opposed to Portman-Daley's students, who authored 40.6 forum posts
per student). Again, this last comparison is particularly significant
because Portman-Daley did not manage peer review activities for her section in
the discussion forums. (She did, however, encourage and in some cases
require student interactions in the forums, which Dyehouse
tended not to do.)
Portman-Daley's students
reported that they preferred the hybrid model to a traditional one, citing more
freedom and flexibility in their learning style as a main reason. Indeed, as
studies have shown, “Moving some learning activities online gives students more
options in structuring their schedules and allows them to integrate their study
with downtime at work or home” (Kibby 88).
However, we believe that their stated preferences also derive from their
engagement with the course. Portman-Daley believes a sense of
self-sponsorship that accompanied the online part of the class, an agentive
feeling in regard to their education, allowed students to maximize and
customize their learning trajectory. One student even went as far as to claim
the entire purpose of the hybridization was “to make us more independent.”
In part, at least, we attribute positive student experiences like these to the
"online-centric" model adopted by Portman-Daley in her course design.
Engagement and the Future of Hybrid Teaching Environments
As illustrated in the
descriptions of the two hybrid approaches, the process of persuasion relied on
what we are calling “engagement.” This concept captures the practical and
academic challenges and activities of the hybrid experiments. Additionally,
“engagement” reflects our department’s twenty-one student learning outcomes,
which guide our general education classes, covering five categories: Rhetorical
Knowledge; Composing, Revising, and Editing Processes; Collaborative Production
and Evaluation of Texts; Reflective Learning; Conventions and Craft. These
individual outcomes do not include the term engagement, but capture what
engagement looks like when enacted in a curriculum. Verbs such as “produce,”
“practice,” and “recognize” highlight the active nature of our curriculum and
our pedagogy. In the comparison between Dyehouse
and Portman-Daley’s approaches, we see examples of how these outcomes were
approached (both successfully and less successfully), including requiring
discussion posts, structuring reflective writing, and modeling peer review. If
the outcomes are the pedagogical goal then we, as instructors, must actively
redefine the process for hitting that goal as we practice with new and newer
technologies.
For the past two
years, our university has participated in the Wabash National Study of Liberal
Arts Education, a large-scale, longitudinal study to investigate critical
factors that affect student learning and enhance the educational impact of
programs. Two findings from the study bear on our current hybrid experiment.
First, curricular change is not a positive indicator of gains in student
learning. Echoing Petraglia,
such a finding warns faculty and administration against pre-authenticating
curricular change (such as online learning), especially change as represented
in educational tools. Second, the study indicates a correlation between low
levels of student engagement and academic challenge. Such a finding is
illustrated in Dyehouse’s discovery that the hybrid
course design intensified students' confusion over the portfolio
approach. They felt challenged or confused, we might argue, because they
were not as engaged.
In Dyehouse’s
conversations with Bob Shea, Shea offered a valuable piece of advice: design
your hybrid course first as an online course. Then, figure out how to add
in face-to-face meetings. As a hard-won insight, it speaks to our larger
point. Designing a hybrid course as if it were to be held entirely online
asks the course designer to invent new tools and teaching methods for helping
students achieve learning outcomes. Such a view treats all of the
course's "technologies" as open to modification and reinvention, and
it encourages a view on how students will perceive, understand, and value (what
we might term “engage”) face-to-face versus online course elements. But
it does so without jettisoning the program’s principles in favor of the latest
technology. In workshops for instructors incorporating Sakai into their
teaching, Pennell asks participants to begin by listing course goals, outcomes,
or objectives on a sheet of paper. Only then does he introduce the technology,
so that the principles rather than the tools are at the forefront of
pedagogical design.
Conclusion
In reflecting on our
hybrid experiment, and looking towards future experiments, we are reminded of
Todd Taylor’s second principle in his ten principles for teaching with
technology: “Identify and build from program principles.” This principle asks
us to maintain our program outcomes as we push towards curricular change,
including, perhaps especially, the implementation of technology. If, as Petraglia suggests, education is, in part, a process of
persuading students to view their learning work as valuable, then educational
technologies can function as useful (but not all-powerful) resources within
that persuasion process. Thus, teachers working to design hybrid courses
have a special opportunity to view both online and classroom tools or
technologies as open to redefinition. Simultaneously, however, these
teachers must bear in mind the potential consequences of such redefinitions and
of the practical substitutions or replacements they entail, especially as those
substitutions or replacements are situated in a specific consideration of both
the instructor’s experience and the students’ engagement levels. In reporting
findings from the Wabash Study, Dr. Charles Blaich
reports that 59% of students entering our land grant university indicate that
their academic experiences will be the most important part of their college
experience. As this hybrid experiment shows, the moving of first-year writing
courses into a hybrid or online environment can have major impacts on students’
academic experiences. In turn, we recommend two moves for writing programs,
especially those moving curriculum into hybrid or online environments:
1.
Have a voice.
Instructors from all disciplines must demand a voice in the technology
decision-making process. Attend meetings, exhibits, and vendor demonstrations.
2.
Require that student
learning outcomes and curriculum drive technology decisions, rather than vice
versa. For some departments and programs this may require a commitment to
develop explicit outcomes and assessment materials.
References
Blaich, Charles. Director of the Wabash National Study of
Liberal Arts Education. “The Challenges and Opportunities of Engaging this New
Generation of Students in Learning.” University of Rhode Island. 29 January
2010. Keynote Address.
Boora, Raj, John
Church, Helen Madill, Wade Brown, and Myles Chykerda.
“Ramping up to Hybrid Teaching and Learning.” Handbook of Research on Hybrid Learning Models: Advanced Tools,
Technologies, and Applications. Eds. Fu Lee Wang, Joseph Fong and Reggie
Kwan. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2010.
Gouge, Catherine.
“Conversations at a Crucial Moment: Hybrid Courses and the Future of Writing
Programs.” College English. 71.4
(March 2009): 338-362.
Kibby, Marjorie Diane. “Hybrid teaching and learning:
Pedagogy versus pragmatism.” Brave New
Classrooms: Democratic Education & the Internet. Eds. Joe Lockard and Mark Pegrum. New
York: Peter Lang, 2007. 87-104.
Miles, Libby, Michael
Pennell, Kim Hensley Owens, Jeremiah Dyehouse, Helen
O’Grady, Nedra Reynolds, Robert Schwegler,
and Linda Shamoon. “Thinking Vertically: Commenting
on Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle’s ‘Teaching about Writing, Righting
Misconceptions.’” CCC. 59.3 (February
2008): 503-511.
Petraglia, Joseph. Reality
by Design: The Rhetoric and Technology of Authenticity in Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998.
Tan, Lennon, Minjuan Wang,
and Jun Xiao. “Best Practices in Teaching Online or Hybrid Courses: A Synthesis
of Principles.” Hybrid Learning, Third
International Conference, ICHL 2010. Eds.
Philip M. Tsang, Simon K. S. Cheung, Victor S. K. Lee, Ronghuai
Huang. Beijing: Springer, 2010. 117-126.
Taylor, Todd. "Ten
Commandments for Computers and Composition." The Allyn & Bacon Sourcebook for Writing
Program Administrators. Ed. Irene Ward and William Carpenter. New York: Allyn & Bacon, 2001. 228-42.
Wilson, Richard W. “Online Hybrid
Methods of Teaching Planning Theory: Assessing Impacts on Discussion and
Learning.” Journal of Planning Education
and Research. 28.2 (Winter 2008): 237-246.