First Week of the Hybrid Class – 9/10/2012

I just finished up the first “week” of the hybrid class.  The real first week was taken up with orienting the students to the class and introducing the format (as I detailed here).  Since then, I have been seeing each of my sections for the first time with real work to do.  I divided the class up so that each student only meets once a week, and, since Labor Day was last Monday, we just finished up the first round of classes today.

For this week, I had the students do the usual stuff – access my lectures and read the textbook.  However, the activity in class centered around the students watching a video and then having a discussion in class.  As this is the first half of American history, we concentrated in on the Spanish conquest and the motivations for coming to the New World.  For that purpose, I chose a video that looks at the transformations that occurred on both sides of the exchange between cultures.  I would have loved to have had the students watch the documentary Guns, Germs, and Steel, but that is not available for free and is not available streaming for my students.  Even more, I would have loved to have them read the book, but that is even more impossible at this stage.  So, I settled on one offered free and streaming through pbs called When Worlds Collide.  It is not bad, although the narrator does get on my nerves a bit.

The actual class day went like this:

1. Troubleshooting/check in on progress
2. Student introductions (I waited for the smaller groups for this)
3. Questions about lecture/textbook content and Uncle Tom’s Cabin
4. Discussion on the documentary

The discussion went well in all four classes.  Nothing spectacular, as expected for the first time out.  And, as expected, only around a third of the students actively participated.  Since the grade is almost completely participation based, I’m going to assume that some more might be participating the next time out.  I also, since it was the first time out with this discussion model, let the students largely direct the discussion.  I tried to ask as few questions as I could and let them go where they wanted.  I started each discussion with the “What did you think?  What did you learn new?” set of questions, and, for the most part, that’s the most guidance I needed to do.  Because of the other things, we only had about 30-40 minutes for the discussions, but that seemed to work pretty well.  What was interesting is how different the four different discussions were.  Even though the material was the same, each class went in different directions.  We did cover many of the same topics, but, instead of a lecture that dictates exactly what each student will hear, this more free-ranging approach allowed the students to concentrate in on what they found interesting.

Another very interesting aspect of this approach was the number of times that I was asked a question.  When lecturing, I rarely ever get stopped and asked questions by my students.  The very mode of a lecture can be fairly prohibitive of that.  With this format, though, I was asked multiple questions by the students.  While some were asking about things they did not understand, the majority of the questions were more along the lines of asking for further information about what they were interested in.  In that way, I feel that the discussion model was a success.

The drawback that is quite apparent at this point is that only about a third of students are participating.  The rest just sit there.  This class cannot work with only a third participation, and grades for the rest are going to be quite low otherwise.  I am going to see how this next set of assignments work, as it will involve some in-class group work.  We shall see what happens then.