Online, Hybrid, and Face-to-Face Higher Education
Dakin Burdick
Academic leaders must balance the relative value of online, hybrid, and face-to-face instruction. Online instructional components have created a vastly larger global market for fully online education. Hybrid instruction combines traditional face-to-face (F2F) instruction with online components to create a more powerful and flexible model of instruction for local instruction. Both promise new economic efficiencies, and in both fields the technical requirements are within the grasp of most American universities. Refinement of both models by experts in instructional design and cognitive science will yield the next great gains in higher education.
American academia is going through greater changes today than it has since the rise of the modern university system in the 1920s. Online enrollments in postsecondary institutions have grown an average of 19% per annum from 2002 to 2009, while total enrollment has grown at less than 2% per annum in the same period. Online instruction in the global market offers enormous rewards to the academic leaders who can use it. Those leaders need to understand the current state of online education and how online components are blending with traditional F2F courses. Online education holds great promise, but it has grown too quickly in many ways and is inconsistent in design and implementation.
The Promise of Online Learning
Sixty-three percent of chief academic officers in the United States say that online courses are “a critical part of their institution’s long term strategy,” according to Allen and Seaman.1 There is good reason for such interest. The disappearance of the middle class has slowed the growth of the traditional student population, but colleges and universities have a number of ways to make up for that shortfall of income. Online courses are accessible both to adult students seeking continued education and to a new global pool of students. Online education is convenient. People today find themselves in a rapidly changing marketplace and often need continued education or retraining to stay competitive. Colleges and universities offer a repository of instructors to accommodate that need, both those with higher degrees and those with life experience and marketable skills. The various available online tools can allow determined students to schedule around the rest of their responsibilities.2
Online courses not only bring great savings but also add new costs. Online courses greatly reduce overhead costs for classrooms, residence halls, and on-campus parking, but they also require greater technological support for students and instructors, ongoing professional development in making the shift to online instruction, and appropriate compensation to retain skilled and committed instructors. Online faculty members often find themselves providing “front line” technical support for their students and need to fully understand the appropriate tools and stay abreast of any new releases. The reduced amount of one-on-one contact and the introduction of adult students with diverse needs and personalities mean that courses with online components require more initial organization and more ongoing administrative duties than do F2F courses. Professional faculty developers are essential in the design and initial delivery of the courses. Finally, adjuncts have become an essential part of the financial structure of many institutions, but they still need to have ongoing professional development to reduce institutional liability. Nonresidential students also require additional support, especially with time-management skills, study habits, responsibility for personal learning, and technology training and support. Finally, adjunct instructors need to feel valued and supported. Where there is plenty of work for adjuncts, they can easily move from one college to another and can represent a double loss—a loss of talent for the institution and a commensurate gain by its competitor.3
Research has repeatedly shown that the means of communication used in education does not significantly affect learning. Unfortunately, many of these studies were for earlier forms of media (correspondence courses, television, teleconferences, videotape, etc.), and poor experimental design confounded many of them. Studies that demonstrated a significant difference between hybrid and F2F courses either were flawed or overgeneralized their results.4 Thankfully, Cindy Dell, Christy Low, and Jeanine Wilker had rigorously demonstrated the same findings in a careful comparison of online and F2F classes. They asserted that “the platform or medium (online vs. face-to face) is not as important as the instructional strategies employed,” a result supported by Regina Schoenfeld-Tacher, Sherry McConnell, and Michele Graham.5
| Table 7.1. Requirements for Effective Student Learning | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| The instructor should …* | The students should … | The institution should provide … * | Course content should include … |
| Demonstrate enthusiasm for the subject | Demonstrate eagerness to learn (enthusiasm, reflective practice) | Security and support for instructors | Declarative knowledge of the course |
| Demonstrate empathy for the students (learn their names, mentor, make time for students) | Establish career goals and devise plans to achieve them | Safe and comfortable learning environments for the student | Procedural knowledge—the skills of the discipline |
| Establish and maintain a civil and supportive learning environment | Demonstrate self-motivation in pursuit of learning goals (preparation, participation, and performance) | Rich learning resources (library, laboratories, practice and performance areas, technology, web resources) | Attitudes and values of the discipline |
| Provide a clear, expert organization of the material | Develop and use study skills (time management, quiet study, situated cognition) | Identification of and additional support for students with inadequate precollege preparation | Authentic tasks (tasks as close to real-world applications as possible) |
| Set high, clear expectations for student performance and hold them to those expectations | Demonstrate personal honesty | Encouragement for students to take control of their learning and training on how to do that | Moderately challenging work |
| Promote a learning-centered environment (active learning, advance organizers, cognitive dissonance, differentiated instruction, structured classroom settings, in-class practice, modeling, and scaffolding) | Develop and demonstrate communication skills (questioning, listening, reading, writing, speaking, visual literacy) | Support for needed student skills (communication, study, technological, tool skills, FYE orientation programs) | General educational goals (communication skills, technological skills, thinking skills, study skills, etc.) |
| Design meaningful assignments | Demonstrate a willingness to collaborate and build interpersonal skills and relationships | Financial aid (awards, grants, scholarships, loans, financial guidance) | |
| Provide frequent and meaningful feedback | Support for student differences and health | ||
| * Chickering and Gamson (1987); McKeachie (1997); Kinzie (2005); De Sousa (2005); Schuh and Kuh (2005); Chickering and Kuh (2005). | |||
Teaching Effectively
There is a great deal of research about effective pedagogy. Learning can be difficult, especially when students already hold deep-seated opinions or beliefs about the topic. For that reason, instructors need to develop support structures for students (including small group work, mentoring, frequent feedback, and constructive feedback) and challenge them with moderately difficult tasks. Learning transfer is highest when the material is authentic (i.e., as close to real-world practice as possible and learned in an environment close to the one in which the material will be used). Students most value instruction that conveys enthusiasm about the subject, respects but challenges the students’ beliefs and opinions, shares valued content, and produces significant student work. Student engagement (the time and effort that students spend on their studies) greatly determines what they gain from their time in higher education.6
Table 7.1 lays out some of the most important requirements for effective student learning.
Hybrid (or blended) learning is a combination of online and F2F components that may also reduce the amount of F2F time for the course. Hybrid courses offer the best of both worlds—the richness of a web-enhanced online course and the high level of collaboration of an F2F course. The variety of tools available to the instructor allow hybrid courses to increase the pace of learning, deepen it with web content, and provide greater structure and more frequent feedback to the students. As a result, hybrid courses have lower dropout rates than fully online courses and faculty report feeling more connected with their students. Hybrid learning may also reduce classroom contact hours for some types of courses, which could mean even greater efficiency in use of classrooms in the future, commensurate reduced overhead costs, and greater flexibility for commuter students.7
In online and hybrid courses, both instructors and students have online access to rich sources of data and increasingly sophisticated collaborative tools. They can share content through web content, e-books, podcasts, vodcasts, Slideshare, or blogs. Students can collaborate with each other through discussion forums, blogs, wikis, Voicethread, Twitter, instant messaging (IM), Skype (and other Voice Over Internet Protocols), and mobile apps. Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are increasingly popular because they aggregate a number of learning tools and protect student privacy. In order of declining market share, the most popular LMSs are Blackboard, Moodle, Desire2Learn, and Sakai. Since 2003, the number of courses at public universities using an LMS has risen from about 18% to over 60%. LMSs serve as a means of enhanced collaboration between faculty and students. Assignments are given and received in the LMS, which has also simplified the use of just-in-time teaching principles. Selected copyrighted materials can be shared through an LMS (which restricts access and therefore market impact) according to the dictates of the TEACH Act.8
The area of online instruction needing the most research is student-faculty and student-student communication. Online students often fail to complete a course, because they feel isolated, bored, or frustrated. It takes time and care to develop a sense of community online, and Jinsong Zhang and Richard Walls (2006) found that most instructors were not making the effort. Asynchronous student-student discussion should be structured and used like small group discussions in F2F courses. Students can also collaborate asynchronously through blogs, wikis, and Twitter and synchronously through IM, Skype (and other Voice Over Internet Protocols), mobile phones, and teleconferencing. Virtual classroom environments like Wimba Classroom or Adobe Connect simulate large group discussions. Avatar chats like those based on Microsoft’s Kinect promise to make the synchronous experience even more effective and attractive.9
The Need for Administrative and Technical Support
Faculty adopting online components of instruction will require both technological and pedagogical training. Ann Luck and Carol McQuiggan10 conducted a needs survey of 260 faculty at Penn State University’s World Campus. Faculty identified as needs both technological training (creation of video clips, audio clips, and websites, and the use of e-conferencing systems) and pedagogical training (ways to assess student progress, conversion of lectures to online formats, facilitating online discussion forums, developing professor and student rapport, interstudent collaboration, and managing the online workload).11 Certainly, resistance can be expected. Instructors may fear an increased workload, since using online elements or going wholly online will obviously require retraining for most faculty members, and the style of instruction is unfamiliar to many instructors. They also understand that technology changes rapidly, and training will need to be ongoing. In addition, most instructional designers now see the constructivist model of instructional design as the most successful in an online format, and instructors may also fear and even resent a perceived reduction in the instructor’s role as content-area expert. Many faculty members still use a teacher-centered model in the F2F classroom so instructional designers need to be supportive and understanding of the needs and desires of faculty members, as well as understanding effective instructional design.12
Students need training in both technological and study skills. Students need to understand the various software packages in use (e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint). Faculty members sometimes expect students to have a greater understanding of technology because they are digital natives, but student expertise is often quite limited and should not be taken for granted. Students also need study skills (time management, reading ability, critical thinking, writing skill, and to a certain extent, learning theory).13
Conclusions
Online education offers a larger market for those who can offer the best product, but it remains an underdeveloped opportunity, with most of the current energy taken up by a land rush for virtual educational property. The development of those properties will require a great deal of expertise. Pedagogy experts will provide guidance, and technical experts will provide the necessary tools and support. In F2F education, there will be an increasing use of online components and probably reduced F2F time for some classes, which will result in greater opportunities for adult and commuter learners, while expanding the market base of students. Research on the appropriate use of flexible scheduling is essential, as are sophisticated models for integrated and blended class management.