The Dos and Don’ts of Blended Curriculum Design—and a Sample Course Plan
by Yael Grushka-Cockayne
What Exactly Does Hybrid Mean? Expand Your Thinking
While hybrid approaches aren’t new, with the move en masse to online teaching, there are more ways to think about them. Here are a few different definitions. Determining which apply to your specific circumstance will impact what material you’ll include in your course, and how.
In person and online: What most people think of as a hybrid format is having a combination of online learners and people in a physical room, in person, where you can see them—even if it’s at a distance of six feet, or two meters.
Let’s break this down even further, as each distinction has a huge impact on your teaching plan for the moment, your pedagogy in general, and your curriculum overall. Consider a scenario in which there’s a separation in student experience: Half of your students only log in remotely, and they’re going to engage with each other in a virtual classroom. Then you have some students who are physically in the classroom together. But there’s no mix between the virtual and in-person students. This impacts your choices around team projects and group work in general—think through how you will arrange breakout groups, discussion groups, or any type of activity that requires interaction between students.
Synchronous and asynchronous: Planning for a live online session is very different from thinking about content that is going to be delivered asynchronously. With a synchronous session, you can plan for an hour and a half, maybe two hours tops, of online simultaneous participation, with learners all logging in at the same time. You have discussions, polls, Q&As, debates, breakout rooms, and all other kinds of tools at your disposal. And that variety should be part of your course design: how do you take advantage of everybody’s presence at the same moment in time? You have a live cohort, which experiences something unique together, and this is going to be different from students who watch the recording later.
Conversely, material taught asynchronously, be it through videos, assessments, quizzes, or competitions, is typically chunked much smaller. You want to keep your videos short; you want to keep articles around a five- to seven-minute read; and you want to really focus on keeping your learners engaged in multiple mediums.
Traditional and flipped classrooms: A less common way of understanding hybrid classes focuses on the distinction between theory and practice—when to teach theoretical concepts versus exercises and putting things into practice with a hands-on component. A traditional classroom does theory together, while students explore practice on their own. And in a flipped classroom, students learn the theory by themselves and then come to the classroom to practice together.
Lecture based and student centered: Who’s leading the conversation, you or your students? Knowing whether you will have lecture- or student-centered discussions will make a difference for your ultimate curriculum and for the delivery mode that you choose. For instance, if you choose to do more lectures, then you can have a simulcast with a combination of some students in one room and another bunch of students in a different room. But if you’re doing a discussion, you can’t really do simulcast mode because you want each individual to have the opportunity to raise their hand and participate, and so on.
As you begin to design your curriculum, you can draw from these various approaches at the broader course level—this is a mix of in-person and online students following the flipped classroom model—and at the individual session level—this will be a synchronous, student-led class.