Jared Stein – Education, Technology, Culture, and the Internet

In the latest post on The Blended Learning Toolkit, Is blended the same as half-distance? , Anders Norberg asks many of the important questions about the design of blended learning experiences that Marc and I push against in our Hybrid Teaching Initiatives. Here’s one summative quote:

..isn’t it a little sad that even in Second Life, an environment where almost everything is possible, universities build campuses with classrooms where their avatar students can sit at their desks, watch power point slides and listen to lectures?

This brings me back once again to Gardner Campbell‘s No Digital Facelifts stance. Read more on the Morning Blend blog

For the past year I’ve been spearheading UVU’s Hybrid Teaching Initiative through our Innovation Center. We’ve focused most of our efforts on designing, conducting, and revising various forms of our HTI workshop series, from a 12-week version to a 3-day version.

Now I’m gathering fuel for reflection, evaluation, and possible expansion of our efforts. Some of that fuel comes from existing research literature, of course, but I’m especially interested in new or unsung anecdotes of hybrid course redesigns from your schools and institutions.

So, whether you’re a teacher, a student, an instructional designer/technologist, or administrator — higher ed, k12, or corporate — please e-mail or post your hybrid course experiences and anecdotes. I’m interested in both successes and failures as a means of contextualizing and analyzing process and outcomes.

Knewton has put together a tidy little infographic on Blended Learning (K12) that’s worth examining–even if you’re in higher ed (more…)

Since we first piloted our Hybrid Teaching Initiative last Fall for UVU faculty designing hybrid/blended courses, I’ve been slowly compiling resources and information on our Innovation Center Hybrid Course wiki. This includes workshop outlines, participant-generated information, and slides compiled from many colleagues and sources.

Feel free to check it out and use any of these resources. I’ll be refining the organization and depth of the materials during the summer as we prepare for our Fall 2011 hybrid workshops.

I facilitated an ITC webinar today on increasing student retention in higher education courses, and though the framing was a little fuzzy, the presenter provided some interesting ideas, which I’ve reflected on, diverged from, and finally consolidated down to three points (more…)