Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jeffrey Bell on October 22, 2010 at 1:58pm

At CSU Chico we have blended Geoscience and Biology courses here that need some work, but could be part of one of these proposals. The classes fill the Area B1 and B2 requirements on our campus. They are both set up with 1 activity (a two hour lab), a 1 hr. discussion, and 1 hour of credit for online "activities", for a 3 unit course. Currently, the online component is primarily a powerpoint presentation with voice-over + online quizzes. The students are supposed to listen to the lecture online, take the quiz, and then go to the discussion meeting, where they can ask questions and do in class activities. This is then followed with a lab activity. We are unhappy with the online lectures, which are not very engaging, and were discussing what to do about them when this call for proposals came out. If anyone wants to help put together a series of linked online activities we are already set up to test them in a blended course.

Permalink Reply by Gerry Hanley on October 22, 2010 at 4:04pm

Thanks for this info Jeff. The key for the NGLC grant will be to find someone who has an exemplary practices for online lectures that you would commit to adopt/integration into these blended courses. How are students' performing in these courses? The reason I ask is that you'd want to say that creating the better blended courses would lead to more students successfully completing the course which inturn results in higher graduation rates.

Permalink Reply by LauraS on October 26, 2010 at 2:12pm

CSU Chico is working with faculty teams to redesign large enrollment courses through our new Academy e-Learning program, to better engage students with the content, with each other, and with the instructors, using the NCAT models of delivery, often blended, sometimes fully online, sometimes with substituted seat time for online activities. We are very interested to share this program with others and improve it as we go. For more information on what we are doing, visit http://www.csuchico.edu/academy/ .

Permalink Reply by Maggie Beers on October 26, 2010 at 2:15pm

Some of our campus discussions at SF State on the Gates Next Gen learning challenges grants have focused around our model of HyFlex Course Delivery as a way to help facilitate graduation. Here's a brief explanation of this approach, which we would be happy to collaborate on with interested campuses.

HyFlex Course Delivery: Facilitating Graduation by Lifting Enrollment Caps and Increasing Student Performance 

Maggie Beers, Director, Academic Technology, San Francisco State University
 


Shrinking budgets, growing enrollments, and a California State University-wide initiative to increase the rate of student graduation have prompted San Francisco State University to develop a comprehensive strategy around the delivery of hybrid-flexible (HyFlex) courses supported by SF State’s implementation of the Echo360 lecture capture technology and the Moodle Learning Management System. To further support this initiative, SF State has built an Echo360-Moodle integration, recently released to the world-wide Moodle community.

HyFlex courses provide students the choice to attend the lecture live in person, view the archived lecture captures online, or a mixture of both depending on the students’ individual needs and learning styles. As part of this strategy, SF State is targeting “bottleneck courses” which are preventing students from advancing to graduation, either because these courses are impacted and students can’t gain adequate access to seats, or because these courses present difficult concepts that lead to higher student failure rates.

To address course impaction, the HyFlex course delivery model enables the university to lift enrollment caps in impacted bottleneck courses because archived lectures can be viewed online, no longer linking course capacity to the physical capacity of the lecture hall. To help improve student performance in bottleneck courses with high failure rates, the archived lectures provided as part of the HyFlex course delivery method enable students to review difficult course concepts over and over, review lectures with peers in study groups, access lectures from prior courses for remediation, and review the first weeks’ lectures in cases where the students were enrolled after the start of the semester.

Please let me know if you may be interested in collaborating on this.

Permalink Reply by LauraS on October 26, 2010 at 2:43pm

Great idea! Fabulous to focus this need for getting through the bottleneck courses. We may have some things in common with Academy e-Learning models, and this. More later...

Permalink Reply by Kathy Fernandes on October 28, 2010 at 10:15am

Maggie,
Is this the site that we should "study" based on your Hyflex program? I thought I saw a different web site before that has more context...?
http://itec.sfsu.edu/hyflex/hyflex_home.htm

Permalink Reply by Maggie Beers on October 28, 2010 at 10:25am

Kathy, That site is created by Dr. Brian Beatty, who has spearheaded the conversations around the term HyFlex course delivery on our campus. He has done some research into its effectiveness within the context of his graduate seminars in the Instructional Technology department. He has also presented at Educause Learning Initiative on this topic, here are his resources: http://net.educause.edu/ELI103/Program/1025668?PRODUCT_CODE=ELI103%...

Here is Academic Technology's website that describes our CourseStream initiative (local branding of our lecture capture implementation), and there is a description of HyFlex: http://coursestream.sfsu.edu/. We have other faculty members on our campus who have also been successful with this approach and have written about it in journals. I will work to put together a more comprehensive set of information on this topic and post it here. Thanks for your interest.

Permalink Reply by LauraS on October 29, 2010 at 10:03am

Thnaks for sharing these resources, Maggie. I'm very happy to see what you are doing an SFSU. I think we could certainly collaborate. I see your model fitting into our Academy e-Learning program as yet another model, which we have taken from the National Center for Academic Transformation. See these links for more information: http://www.csuchico.edu/academy and http://thencat.org/PlanRes/R2R_ModCrsRed.htm

Permalink Reply by Betsy Eudey on November 2, 2010 at 1:08pm

This merging of HyFlex and the Academy e-Learning might be something Stanislaus could get on board with as well as long as we are defining "large classes" within our institutional context (which might not be as large at at other schools) We are currently engaging in streaming video of courses offered in our ITV classes, but have not yet really expanded this to other classroom formats, although I think there is interest in doing so.

I'm trying to get information from enrollment services about our large classes so I can query faculty to see if they would be interested in such a project. We understandably have resistance to activities that seem to encourage "more" large classes (our SFR has increased a lot already in the last 2 years), but we also have many who are teaching large classes that would most certainly like to be sure that student learning is being supported.

Permalink Reply by Maggie Beers on November 4, 2010 at 4:29pm

For those of you who are interested in collaborating on the HyFlex / eLearning Academy proposal, we have planned a conference call tomorrow (Friday, November 5th) via Elluminate Live from 11AM-12PM:

Participant Link:
https://sas.elluminate.com/m.jnlp?password=M.EFC6441BC5541EC65E5815...
&sid=2010182

Unfortunately I just noticed that the math thread is also offering a conference call at that same time, so let me know if any of you interested folks have a conflict and we can see who can reschedule.

Permalink Reply by Maggie Beers on November 5, 2010 at 1:03pm

Thank you to those who attending this morning's Elluminate Live session on the Academy eLearning and HyFlex NGLC proposals. You can review the session here at this link:

Playback Table:
https://sas.elluminate.com/mrtbl?suid=M.8B0F956FE046A0786DCDB99A5C8...

We shared many ideas, and toggled back and forth on the idea of submitting separate proposals for each, or merging them into one. We decided that we should continue to work independently to write up skeleton drafts using the official NGLC pre-proposal template, with Chico creating one focused only on scaling up the eLearning Academy, and SF State creating on focused only on scaling up HyFlex course delivery. We will share these drafts before Monday and see where they could possibly merge, or not. Regardless of whether these are funded, we all agreed that there is a lot of value to come from collaborating and sharing common resources and models in these two areas. A great outcome could be a module (OER) on HyFlex for the eLearning Academy. Stay tuned for more...

Permalink Reply by Jim Julius on November 8, 2010 at 4:40pm

So, Maggie, SDSU is still interested in collaborating on HyFlex specifically. I talked with Suzanne Aurilio and she didn't indicate that we were now on our own if we wanted to move forward ... I'm not sure whether I should contribute to the google doc or not at this point - let me know your thoughts.

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