CW2001 Program - Computers and Writing

11:15 — 12:30 Session B.4
Combining Traditional AND Online Teaching:
A Cross-Institutional, Faculty and Student
Roundtable on “Hybrid” Courses
RB 112
Peter Sands, moderator
Peter Sands, Carla Garnham, Robert Kaleta, Claudine Keenan, Doug
Eyman, Alan Aycock
This roundtable brings together teachers, students, and instructional
designers from two very different institutional settings to discuss an
emerging model for computer-mediated teaching: so-called hybrid
courses. Hybrid courses merge elements of distance education with
face-to-face teaching in an attempt to create a more cohesive learning
environment, aid teachers and students in connecting online discourse
with the real persons behind the words, and improve communication
about successes and problems during courses. They also create a
more cohesive learning environment; permit teachers to integrate
resources, individuals, and activities that aren’t available in a physical
classroom; and help students assume a more active, self-directed,
and independent role in a course. We are trying to preserve the more
flexible opportunities for reflection, dialogue, and small group work that
are characteristic of online learning.
The participants in the roundtable are from an urban, commuter,
Research-I university and a rural, residential college with a small
graduate program and comprise both faculty members and graduate
students who are either teaching or have taken a course using the
hybrid model. While much of the pedagogy of hybrid courses is familiar
to computer-using teachers of writing, participants in the roundtable
bring to the discussion new perspectives on the ways hybrid courses
can address needs in psychology, anthropology, teacher education, and
other curricular areas, suggesting ways interested teachers can learn
from the experience of Writing Across the Curriculum programs and the
more recent Electronic Communication Across the Curriculum movement.
Computers & Writing 2001
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