Lora Hobbs, Missouri State University

Lora Hobbs is a senior instructor in the department of religious studies at Missouri State University. She has an MEd in educational and counseling psychology from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and an MA in religious studies from Missouri State University, Springfield. She began teaching as adjunct faculty at Missouri State University in 1988 and has taught full-time in the department of religious studies since 1997. Hobbs’s areas of interest include women in religion. Her “women and religion” students and she have developed both a library and online archive of The Religious Lives of Ozarks Women. Her research has focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning, specifically in the areas of student motivation and engagement in various course delivery formats. This research is based on Hobbs’s development of the “Introduction to Religion” course in blended and online formats alongside the traditional face-to-face format. Most recently, Hobbs has developed Missouri State University’s “First-Year Programs” course as a blended course for nontraditional students.

The Challenge of Hybrid Courses

I am a senior instructor in the department of religious studies at Missouri State University. And I have a confession to make…I’m Lora Hobbs, and I’m an Aggie. I was born and raised on a farm in West Central Illinois, raised hogs as my FFA project throughout high school, was an FFA (yes, Future Farmers of America) officer and, eventually, an Illinois state farmer. I can’t shake it (and, honestly, would never want to), regardless of my career field. So, first let me say a little about the source of this phrase: hybrid vigor. Hybrid vigor is a phrase that my dad and my Ag teachers taught me back when I was in high school. Hybrid vigor is the result of effectively crossing two (or more) pure breeds of hogs (or cattle or goats or…) so that the strengths of the individual breeds are maximized and the weaknesses are minimized in the resulting hybrid. When this type of cross is achieved, the production and health of the hybrid exceeds that of the individual breeds. Thus, hybrid vigor.

Four or five years ago, I first heard the term “hybrid” applied to pedagogy. Karl Kunkel, sociology professor at Missouri State University, had created a hybrid (now also called blended) course. As he reported on his experience at one of our Teaching Showcases, I had a parallel track of what I knew of hybrids in the livestock world running next to his experience in course design. Is hybrid vigor possible in education? What was the possibility of effectively crossing two course formats, fully face-to-face and fully distance, so that the strengths of each are maximized and the weaknesses of each are minimized in the resulting hybrid? Furthermore, in what ways could I substantiate productivity, effectiveness, and, ultimately, educational vigor (vitality and strength)?

In my desire to understand whatever “science” there might be in crossing course formats, I began reading whatever I could find. The resource that blew the doors open for me was the Sloan-C International Conference of Online/Asynchronous Learning. I attended that conference two years in a row, taking along my graduate assistant who would be the technology “specialist” on the project. Each year, the conference was preceded by a daylong workshop on blending with a purpose and mapping the blend. The resources available at this conference were phenomenal. One of the main presenters both years was Anthony Picciano. I highly recommend any of his publications on blended course philosophy and design, especially Blended Learning: Research Perspectives (coedited with Charles D. Dziuban, Sloan-C, 2007).

I also needed a means to assess whether the blend really was effective in producing educational vigor. The typical measures for educational effectiveness are grades and class attendance.  However, I am sure there are readers, just like myself, who made good grades in classes that left much to be desired as far as life and vigor are concerned. So, grades and class attendance alone would not demonstrate what I was seeking. At about that time, Chantal Levesque-Bristol, then director of our Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at Missouri State University (now at Purdue University), had produced a validity-tested instrument that measured student motivation (Levesque, Sell, Zimmerman, 2006) as proscribed by Self-Determination Theory (Deci, Ryan, 1985, 2000). Self-Determination Theory asserts that a positive learning climate promotes higher levels of student motivation. This theory concludes that three ingredients must be evident in a learning climate that is conducive to student motivation. Those three ingredients are autonomy (sense of choice and control), competence (a sense that they can do the work and/or that they have the resources to do the work), and relatedness (a sense of connection to the instructor and to classmates). The Integrative Model on Student Motivation that Levesque, et al., developed (based on Deci and Ryan’s work) asserts that instructors can strategically place these specific ingredients in a learning environment that will result in higher levels of student motivation. Their assessment survey measures for each of those ingredients and correlates those results to indicate the level of motivation reached in a classroom. Measuring student motivation, based on students’ experiences of the learning climate, seemed a suitable means of measuring vigor in the hybrid (or blend). 

The two “purebreds” were available to me. I had been teaching “Introduction to Religion” in a face-to-face format for several years. Since 2003 I had been teaching and continually transforming the course as an online course. So, what was I hoping to accentuate from each original class and what was I hoping to minimize or eliminate in the hybrid?

I began mapping the blend by blocking out each topic in my course and listing what I had found to be the best pedagogical resources from each delivery format. 

In Fall 2009, I launched a blended version of “Introduction to Religion.” The class was scheduled as a Tuesday through Thursday class. Students came to a 75-minute class on Tuesdays, then the Thursday class meeting time was exchanged for online lecture and web-based media content that students could do at any time before our next Tuesday class meeting. At the first Tuesday meeting of the semester, I promised never to lecture in our Tuesday meetings. The content of those face-to-face Tuesday sessions would be question-and-answer, peer review of writing, small group discussion, and full-class discussion and debate. In addition, all quizzes and exams would also be online. 

The challenges included:

• Not resorting to lecturing to fill the weekly class meeting time. If all I have to offer in the class meeting is more lecture, then I had might as well film those lectures and make the class fully online.
• Developing meaningful class interaction. I think of this in two dimensions: 1) The class interactions need to be meaningful between the students, as well as between myself and the students; and 2) The class interactions need to be meaningful pedagogically. Am I just giving them busy-work to fill the time? Or am I guiding them in interactions that clarify and solidify the learning?
• Organizing the class well and communicating clearly. The blend must be well-mapped and the “map” must be easily accessible and easily understandable. I do this in at least four ways:
  • A Course Outline in the syllabus that clearly states the plan for each Tuesday session, as well as what they will be doing between each Tuesday class session.
  • A Weekly Assignment Module page on Blackboard. I have their Blackboard site set to always open to that Weekly Assignment Module page. For each week, the assignments are listed, plus the links are given to each lecture, PowerPoint, and assignment.
  • A note on the board or screen in each class meeting that communicates that day’s agenda, assignments for the upcoming week, and the plan for the next class meeting.
  • An e-mail after each class meeting that summarizes and positively reflects on what we did in the previous session and directs them to the Weekly Assignment Module.

Now that I’m teaching my sixth semester of the blended version, I can say that the blended version does accentuate the strengths and minimize some — if not all — of the liabilities of each delivery format.

The results from both the assessment tool, as well as student comments, suggest that the blended/hybrid format can be a strong modality that creates a powerful and positive teaching and learning environment. For instance, in the Spring 2010 semester, on the assessment measures of autonomy, competence, and learning climate — a combination of autonomy, competence, and relatedness — the blended course exceeded my seated course on every measure. The other learning climate ingredient of relatedness was virtually the same in both my seated and blended courses. Nothing was lost, and there was actually some gain in decreased face-to-face time that allows for increased student preparation time.

Though this particular course was a 100-level, introductory, general education course, I approached the interplay between the class meeting with the students and the weekly preparation by the students much like an upper-level seminar course. The expected level of interaction with the content and the application of the content in the classroom with classmates in one-on-one, small group, or large group guided discussions provided subtle motivation for the students to read, watch, listen, and prepare well. The peer responses to their preparation of discussion guides, their reading of select paragraphs in written assignments, and their group analysis of philosophies and theories created a natural motivation to come prepared to class. 

So, in conclusion, why move toward blended courses, especially in our field of religious studies?

• Students come to class more prepared.
• There are more quality and extended class discussions on the topics that drew us to this field. One student wrote:
  I have never had a class in college that worked in groups as much as your class did, and it was really nice. I really enjoyed being able to hear other people’s opinion on topics and getting to know other people in the class. So many of the classes here on campus, ok most of them, are just so routinely taught. You come into the class and listen to your professor lecture for an hour or more. There usually isn’t much interaction with the other students. So it was really nice to be able to come to a class that switched it up, where it was encouraged for you to discuss things with other students in the class (Sheila).
• The quality of face-to-face engagement with instructor, class, and content increases.
• Students come to class with questions about the content!
• The asynchronous nature gives students options of when, where, and how to complete much of the course. What I find especially notable is that the high level of autonomy the students experienced in the blended course was also associated with their experience of competence in the course. When given choices, resources, and clear directions (autonomy), they felt more competent. When students feel competent, they are more motivated.
• Nontraditional students are especially attracted to these courses. Often, nontraditional students take online courses, because of the demands on their time and because many are driving from a distance to take classes, since they cannot easily relocate. The blended course decreases the time they have to travel to come to campus and, at the same time, gives them the instructor contact they often wish they had in online courses. It is the best of both worlds for them, especially.
• More content is covered without compromising engagement.
• Students can process the lecture portion at their own pace and method (and preferred learning time and environment). Students for whom English is not their first language especially appreciate this opportunity to have the time and space to grasp the online lecture material.
• If classroom learning is active and directly tied to the online content and weekly preparation, students can’t just “show up.” At the more extrinsic level of motivation, students don’t want to “lose face” with their class by not showing up prepared. At the more intrinsic levels, they find that when they prepare, they feel competent and their interest goes up.
• With regard to institutional interests, the blended format alleviates the strain that many universities and colleges have on available classroom space. For instance, another blended course instructor and I share the same classroom; I meet with my blended course at 12:30 on Tuesday, and he meets with his blended course at 12:30 on Thursday in the same classroom. One more classroom would have to be available at that time if we were both teaching traditional face-to-face classes. Blended courses potentially double classroom availability!
• With regard to instructors’ interests, the blended format provides some scheduling efficiency in the classroom. For instance, I teach my “Introduction to Religion” blended course at 12:30 on Tuesdays; then, I teach my “First-Year Programs” blended course at 12:30 on Thursdays. Thus, the traditional Tuesday through Thursday instructional time allows me to teach two classes in a slot in which I would traditionally only be able to teach one class.
• The format opens up new possibilities for classroom involvement for students.  Particularly, one student commented:
  This class has challenged me to be more engaged in the classroom. I have always just been the student to sit there and not say much. But in this class with all of the group work, I have said my thoughts to the groups that I have been in. I think this will benefit me because now in other classes I know it is ok to speak up and talk (MacKenzie).