Center for Teaching & Learning

« Hybrid Course Development Program

CASE STUDY
Class: BSAD 147 – Green IT and Virtualization
Faculty: Thomas Chittenden, Lecturer

» Motivation and Goals
» Course Redesign
» Online Teaching Components
» Assessments
» Challenges and Revisions
» Evaluation

Motivation and Goals

Click here to watch a video introduction.

Tom Chittenden, lecturer in the School of Business Administration, had an ideal course to explore hybrid design—BSAD 147: Green IT and Virtualization. Among other things, the course focuses on the environmental benefits of emerging IT platforms, strategies to extend the life of electronic equipment, to reduce power demands, to manage global E-Waste and recycling, and “cradle-to-cradle” design strategies.

There were both instructional and logistical reasons for Tom’s interest in redesigning the course as a hybrid.

Instructional
As workplace virtualization is one of the course topics, Tom wanted students to use web-conferencing toolsBroadly defined, web conferencing tools allow people to have real-time meetings over the web. that they may encounter in the workplace and to become familiar with the benefits and challenges of a virtual work environment.

Logistical
The infrastructure resources associated with this class are significant and, in some class sessions, all students are required to access a limited-capacity server to execute certain tasks simultaneously. The resulting lag times were not only frustrating and inefficient, they interfered with the learning experience. In a hybrid class where students have flexibility for when they do the work on the server, this load could be distributed.

The Course Redesign

Class Format

Tom chose the Replacement Model for the redesign. (View other hybrid models here.) This means that class meetings are regularly replaced with outside-of-class sessions using two formats that Tom called “remote” and “shifted.”

For the remote sessions, all students were online at the same time, but connected from remote locations with a web conferencing tool.

For the shifted sessions, class meeting time was asynchronous and students had 5-7 days to complete tasks for that class. These tasks could include watching a screencast lecture, watching peer presentations, or completing a step-by-step lab.

Students attended traditional class meetings about 60% of the total class time.

Learning Objectives

The course learning objectives did not significantly change with the move to hybrid design.

• Quantify and qualify the economic, environmental and social considerations of existing and of emerging, sustaining and disruptive innovations in business operations.
• Anticipate and predict degrees of success of closed loop supply chains and regenerative design for material reutilization of technical nutrients.
• Predict paradoxical results of ecological efficiency improvements using economic theory.
• Model document workflows, apply the systems development life cycle framework and manage virtualized systems.
• Synthesize matters relating to the management of datacenters including the implications and benefits of infrastructure, platform and application cloud sourced solutions.

Online Teaching Components

Remote Sessions
For these sessions, Tom used GoToMeeting, a popular web conferencing tool. Because he felt that including video in these student presentation meetings didn’t add value, they only used the audio and screen capturing components.

Shifted Sessions
In his face-to-face classes, Tom uses quizzes to help students keep up with the readings and lectures. Blackboard quizzes (using the Test ToolBlackboard’s Test Tool options include many question types (e.g. essay, short answer, image hot spot, and more.) It’s a robust tool that provides options to upload larger batches of questions into pools, tagging them for level of difficulty, and entering a formula to have Blackboard randomly generate different tests for each student, depending on the pool sizes. The CTL holds regular Blackboard workshops on creating assessments and the Dr. Is In Program is also available to learn more. ) offered a relatively easy way to maintain this practice, while leaving the traditional class sessions for more active learning.

Tom produced some screencast lecturesA screencast is a movie recorded of activity on a computer screen that often contains audio narration and sometimes a view of the speaker. The CTL offers workshops in screencasting every semester. Read more about screencasting and integrated existing videos related to course content. All video content was available in Blackboard and students were able to review content as many times as needed.

Other regular, “shifted” assignments included system-building labs where students accessed a virtual server to build systems, and providing feedback for peers on their “Subject Matter Scenarios” assignments, as described below.

Assessments

“Subject Matter Scenarios”: A regular assessment for this class, this assignment includes a research-based paper with an accompanying 20-minute, in-class presentation. While the presentation was valuable for practicing public speaking, Tom observed that many other students “tuned out” during their peers’ presentations.

For the hybrid class, Tom redesigned this assignment and took advantage of the “shifted” class sessions. Students still wrote a paper, but instead of taking class time for presentations, they made 10-minute screencasts. Students who were not presenting that week were required to provide written feedback to the student presenter. Tom did not grade the paper/screencast until the student/presenter had the opportunity to incorporate the peer feedback.

Quizzes: In the past, proctored quizzes were a significant part of the class—a valuable way to keep students on top of the weekly work. However, in the hybrid class, Tom was reluctant to use up class time for these quizzes, but felt a little wary about testing in a non-proctored, online environment. The solution was to give the quizzes online, in Blackboard, but to ascribe to them less weight.

Here is the overall grading schema:

Challenges and Revisions

Challenge:
Tom did not anticipate the amount of time students would spend on writing feedback to their classmates on their presentations for the Subject Matter Scenarios.

Solution: For the next iteration of the class, Tom will require them to alternate weeks for when they review peer work.

Challenge: Initially, the course schedule – meaning which days were in-class, remote, or shifted – was variable, and this caused some confusion for students.

Solution After just a few weeks into the semester, Tom revised his schedule so that Tuesdays were always the traditional class meeting day. He’ll be sure to make the schedule very clear for the next iteration of the class.

Evaluation

Tom observed that attendance at the traditional class was high—students made the commitment to attend. He also noticed that the shifted class provided students with an opportunity to catch up and get work done.

Student Survey Results

Completed by 19 out of 41 students (46%)