Best+Practices

=Best Practices in Hybrid or Blended Learning=

January 24, 2010 =5 Teaching Tips for Professors—From Video Games from CHE=

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includes a video and summary of study including the following lessons: Here are five lessons I gleaned from recent talks with several leading researchers involved in education and gaming: Professors in most college classes don't always give feedback as rapid or exhaustive as that. Sure, they return papers and other assignments with number grades and occasional comments, but that hardly resembles those score screens on an Xbox 360 game. "What if, for each of the aspects of the assignment, you got a subgrade," suggests Mr. Plass. "Students could see that 'in these parts I got an A, but in these other parts I got a failing grade.'" That might be more meaningful than a big red C at the top of a paper. "One of their concerns is whether the game is too hard and you might die in places that you're not supposed to die," he says, noting that Microsoft runs testers through the game and uses tracking software to identify rough spots, like one area where players routinely fell off a cliff because they couldn't tell it was there. Mr. Plass says he now tests his center's educational games in a similar way, though with fewer testers than Microsoft uses. "If we find in a particular game that there's a particular problem that most kids fail to solve, even though the problem isn't all that hard, we would try to figure out why that is," he says. The same concept could be applied to testing online courses, even if they are not in game form. "I'd freely admit that we don't do enough user-design testing in the online courses we make," says Jared Stein, director of instructional-design services at Utah Valley University, when I ran the idea past him recently. "We tried to implement that as part of our process last year, and we just ran into too many other fires that we had to put out," he says. But it is a good goal for any online program, he adds, and can be as simple as sitting one student down and observing her work through a course. The idea that stories are powerful motivators drove a recent experiment at the Florida Virtual School, one of the nation's largest online public schools. Last year the school began offering a semester-long course in American history in the form of a 3-D online video game. Players take on the role of a secret agent and walk around a futuristic city, trying to stop a shadowy group from overthrowing the government. The students collect clues (which take the form of articles about American history) and expose bad guys (the ones who state incorrect facts). "Everything students do is on target with the story," says Jeramy Gatza, a curriculum-innovation specialist for Florida Virtual, who previously taught history in the classroom. "There's no busywork, there's no 'you've got to do this because it's on the syllabus.'" "There's an assumption that learning is supposed to be dry and tedious and painful and awful," says David Wiley, an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University. "If it looks like a game, it immediately gets written off." That shouldn't be so, says Mr. Wiley. He's clearly not afraid to be playful himself, though. Last year he delivered a course about online learning that was modeled on a role-playing game (think Dungeons and Dragons, where the professor is the dungeon master).
 * 1. Give frequent and detailed feedback.** Just about every video game prominently displays a scoreboard. It can be incredibly detailed, with tallies of gold grabbed, enemies slain, levels won, shooting accuracy attained, and more. "What kids do in entertainment games," says Jan L. Plass, an associate professor of educational communication and technology at New York University, "is they say, 'I need to work on my stealth or my potion-making skills' or whatever," thanks to that detailed accounting. "It's part of that drive to know yourself—what you're good at and what you're not good at. We really want to know."
 * 2. Test before going live.** The big video-game companies use hundreds, even thousands, of beta testers before ever putting a title on store shelves. That has impressed Mr. Plass, who is a director of NYU's Games for Learning Institute and has worked with Microsoft's video-game group to see how the company tests its popular game Halo.
 * 3. Narrative can answer the question "Why are we learning this?"** Stories are powerful ways to engage people, and an immersive story line is one reason players of World of Warcraft work so hard to solve puzzles in the game, argues Ms. Steinkuehler, the Madison assistant professor. On her blog she explains that the player who created the mathematical model delivered it in a playful way that fit the story line of the game, disparaging some spells and character types as he went, rather than simply stating raw numbers.
 * 4. Don't be afraid of fun.** Perhaps remembering the worst of "edutainment," many professors still shy away from the idea that a college course can be fun.
 * 5. Not every subject works as a game.** There's a vast graveyard of serious games that have failed, commercially and educationally. "Blindly throwing games at an instructional problem is not a good solution," says Brett E. Shelton, an assistant professor of instructional technology at Utah State University, who has developed some educational games. "I'd actually consider myself to be more of a skeptic rather than an advocate of instructional games, believe it or not."

The Best of Both Worlds: Teaching a Hybrid Course
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 * Abstract** While online education alone has strengths and weaknesses, the benefits of online learning can be used to enhance face-to-face teaching. This article will discuss an example of capitalizing on the strengths of online courses to improve interaction and student performance within a traditional class setting.

Blended Learning
[] It covers efficacy of the model – both from student learning outcomes and administrative perspectives, factors in successful conversion, models for section offerings that can maximize budgetary considerations in course offerings, and key questions to ask in a conversion project.

Blended Learning Systems: Definition, Current Trends, and Future Direction
[] A pre-press chapter from the upcoming Handbook for Blended Learning

Hybrid Courses
[] This website is from the Learning Technology Center at Univ. of Wisconsin. Wonderful resources here, be sure to check out the faculty resources, which include [|TIPS] and [|TEN QUESTIONS FOR COURSE REDESIGN]

Future Directions of Blended Learning in Higher Education and Workplace Learning Settings
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The Seven Principles of Effective Undergraduate Education - Technology Implementation
[] I include this because Chickering's work is seminal to the discussion. The seven core principles of good teaching practice are covered here, from the eLearning perspective.