PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION AND GOALS
The City University of New York, an urban public university serving more than 480,000 students, has launched a Hybrid Initiative to increase the number of hybrid/blended courses offered on its 23 campuses. The presentation will outline the institutional goals of the project, which include enhancement of teaching and learning, conservation of classroom space, and scalability, as well as how these projects are being executed on nine very different campuses sharing a common enterprise LMS and student record system. Participants from Lehman College, a senior college; Bronx Community College, and Medgar Evers College, a comprehensive college; will discuss the goals and challenges of implementing their campus-based projects within the larger institutional context.
CONTEXT
An RFP issued in December 2009 called for innovative campus-based plans for faculty and course development, including projected impact (number of faculty involved, number of hybrid/blended courses and sections offered, number of students reached, conservation of classroom space, and learning outcomes); capacity to serve as a successful model at the campus and University-wide; potential for scaling up and sustenance of innovations; and demonstration of significant campus commitment to the project. Nine proposals were accepted for funding, from campuses with divergent levels of current online instruction, ranging from institutions offering fully online degrees to those only offering several dozen online sections per semester.
APPROACH
Centrally, a cross-campus institute involving team leaders and other representatives from participating campuses convened in April 2010, to refine the goals of the initiative and to facilitate the sharing of resources and the development of a community of practice. The work of the institute is being continued, appropriately, in a hybrid format, via a sub-group on the newly-launched CUNY Academic Commons, an open-source social networking site offering blogs, wikis, groups, forums and "wires," designed to promote a free-flowing exchange of knowledge amongst colleagues across the University.
In terms of campus specifics, at Medgar Evers College, there is growing interest in online instruction, but limited technical and instructional design support for faculty development. To address this challenge, the Medgar Evers College RFP called for teams of faculty who would agree to develop a hybrid/blended section of a course in the College's General Education program. Gen Ed was targeted because these courses are always well, if not over-subscribed, ensuring enrollments, and because offering hybrid/blended Gen Ed sections introduces students to online learning early in their college careers. This portion of the presentation will focus on the challenges of having faculty work in teams to develop a single course site and strategies to increase students' awareness of the benefits of taking hybrid/blended courses.
As part of its participation in the CUNY Hybrid Initiative, Lehman College has created models for faculty development across the Gen Ed curriculum with special emphasis on Writing Intensive courses. The program supports faculty in regular workshops and a mentoring program by sharing pedagogical theory and best practices in teaching writing as applied to hybrid/blended teaching. This specially targeted subset of courses is a strategic emphasis at Lehman, a Hispanic Serving Institution which delivers 12% of regular instruction in blended and asynchronous environments. Lehman's assessment of student learning in hybrid/blended Writing Intensive courses seeks to determine the extent to which writing skills improve in courses using this mode of instruction (something recent research would lead us to expect). This portion of the presentation will focus on the methods employed in assisting faculty to apply specific aspects of hybrid/blended teaching to increase the effectiveness of Writing Intensive courses and methods of imbedding in the courses themselves elements for assessing improvements in student mastery of writing skills.
At Bronx Community College, the Hybrid Initiative builds upon existing faculty development and student support models established over the past five years. This part of the presentation will describe the three key dimensions of BCC's approach: peer faculty mentoring, Instructional Technology Tutors, or ITTs (academically successful students who are trained in tutoring techniques and technology applications and assigned to work with faculty participants), and pedagogical innovation which embeds greater levels of interactivity (student to student, student to instructor, and student to course content). Peer mentoring combines intensive face-to-face seminars with extended course development, conducted online with experienced peers who assist participants with course design and pedagogical questions. ITTs perform a range of duties in hybrid classes, from content tutoring to Discussion Board moderation. Examples of pedagogies designed to strengthen interactivity, employing multimedia, screen capture, and web 2.0 applications, will also be presented.
