Introduction: Getting Started

Designing an effective hybrid course requires careful thought and time to plan, develop, design, and implement the course. The first step in the process is to ask yourself several questions. Take a few minutes to answer in writing the following questions about the hybrid course you are designing:

• Who are my learners?
• What do I want my learners to learn?
• What tools do they need to learn?
• How will I determine what they have learned?

Knowing the answers to these questions is crucial to beginning your planning process. After you have an idea about what your learners already know, you have clearly defined goals for their learning, you have identified some tools that will help them learn, and you have detemined how you will assess their learning, you can begin to develop a flowchart or storyboard for how you plan to develop your course.

Flowcharting and storyboarding are methods to help you to organize the content in your learning environment One of the biggest challenges in designing a hybrid course is to determine how much time in the course will be face-to-face (F2F) and how much time will be online. Will it be 80% in-class and 20% online or 60/40, 50/50, or 40/60. The recommendation is to begin initially with more time in-class, so you and your students become comfortable with the learning environment. Flowcharting and storyboarding offer two complementary means to help you determine not only the time factor but also the integration of the two types of learning environments. To understand the principles of each method, do the following:

Visit the flowcharting web site. Read the material and then begin your flowchart that will identify the learning materials and assignments you plan to use in your course, remembering the answers you defined to the questions above. This flowchart should identify the assignments and projects your students will be interacting with in the F2F environment and the online environment. One of the greatest challenges in designing a hybrid course is to ensure that the F2F and online feed into each other, that the learning environment is integrated and connected. Some faculty complete their flowcharts on post-its so they can move the sections around as they are planning. This stage of your planning will help you to develop the content and establish the environment for your course.

After you have your flowchart for your entire course, next, visit the storyboard web site. Read the material and then use your flowchart to begin to develop a storyboard for the online part of your course. Storyboard the web site needed to accompany your course. Include the page layout, color scheme, and navigation. Again some faculty use post-its or separate pieces of paper for each unit of the web site, so they can rearrange the pieces as they continue to rethink the site. This stage of your planning will help you to design the online part of your course.

An important area to consider at this time is assessment. What activities will you include to determine what your students learned. What collaborative and individual projects, assignments, surveys, tests, discussion forums, web site development, Internet searches, or portfolios will you collect and evaluate? When and where in the course will these take place? At this time, add to your flowchart for the entire course where you plan to include assessments. For those that will take place online, add them to your storyboard.

Now you are ready to choose and learn the technology you will need to know to implement your hybrid course. You will need to use a course management system, such as Blackboard, or a web editor to organize the online part of your course. This will allow all the elements of your online part of the course to be in one place. If you use Blackboard to set up the online elements of your course, you will probably need to learn a web editor, such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage, to develop some learning objects that you will link to from your Blackboard site. You will find online tutorials for both Blackboard and Dreamweaver on the Technical Applications Center site.

With your completed planning methods, your assessments defined, and your technology skills, you are ready to implement your hybrid course.