Jake Clayton is a lecturer in the First-Year Writing Program and holds an M.A. from N.C. State. Along with teaching traditional and hybrid courses for the FYWP, Jake teaches online courses in Women’s and Gender Studies and Science, Technology, and Society for N.C. State’s Interdisciplinary Studies Program.
Whether you have experience teaching in online spaces, experience teaching first-year writing, or neither, hybrid composition classes pose a unique set of challenges for first-time instructors. What follows are a few tips and tricks that might not be obvious to new hybrid instructors. For more experienced instructors, these points may serve as a helpful list of reminders as you plan your course for the upcoming semester.
-
Reconsider your assignment sequence.
I love assignments that challenge students to take their own experiences as objects of study. From literacy narratives to autoethnographies, my face-to-face classes have always emphasized that students’ concerns were academic concerns, and vice versa. In hybrid courses, however, students may feel less comfortable with these “high-disclosure” assignments, even if the substance of those assignments doesn’t seem too heavy to us. Unlike face-to-face classes, students may not feel a strong sense of community with their peers, and you may need to adjust your assignments accordingly. Love your literacy narratives too much to leave them out? Give students time to get comfortable with each other by moving the assignment back, or head into the semester with the explicit goal of building a tight-knit community. Laura Waldrep has already written a great blog post about using icebreakers to build a sense of familiarity among students. Along with icebreakers, consider low-stakes group and partner assignments for hybrid days, and make sure that everyone has a current photo as their profile picture on the class website. If you’re comfortable with Blackboard Collaborate, offer up video chat as another way that students can get participation credit for online-day discussions. Sometimes it really is as simple as putting a name with a face.
-
Make yourself available.
Hybrid courses also reduce the amount of face-to-face time you get with students, which can make already-timid students even less likely to solicit help. During the first half of my first semester teaching hybrid classes, for example, I saw a dramatic drop in the number of students I was seeing in office hours, and I knew it wasn’t because of their easy mastery of the material. Along with requiring that students come to office hours (or conference with you) early in the semester, you may need to provide an electronic scaffold for students who want to see you one-on-one. I found that a Google spreadsheet provided an easy avenue for students to sign up for office hours, and I actually had more students in office hours when they didn’t feel obligated to email me or tell me they were coming in person.
-
Keep video lectures short.
Video lectures provide yet another avenue for face-to-face(ish) contact, but it’s important to consider the environment in which students will probably be viewing them. Holding students’ attention for ten minutes can be challenging when you have near-absolute control of the other stimuli in the room, so it’s easy to see how longer video lectures might not fit students’ busy lives. If you’re not sure about the length of your lectures, consider using a site that provides analytics. YouTube, for example, allows you to see both the number of times your lecture has been viewed, and the average duration for which it was viewed. My first video lecture as a hybrid instructor was just over 12 minutes long. The average duration viewed was not quite half of that. Raise the stakes by quizzing students or leaving important instructions until the end of the video, or acknowledge the medium’s limitations and keep your lectures brief and to the point.
-
Reread your own instructions.
This tip is essential if you’re moving to hybrid courses after teaching in a more traditional classroom setting. You may feel that your written instructions are self-explanatory, but it’s easy to discount all of the context we provide our students when we’re in the same physical space. From body language to intonation to entire sentences that simply don’t appear in our instructions, our performances as teachers are an integral component in face-to-face settings. Moodle’s course copy feature is great, but moving your daily class instructions into your hybrid course one day at a time provides you an opportunity for revision with a digital environment in mind.
-
Don’t forget about your students.
A hybrid course can be an intimidating project for a new instructor, but it also poses serious challenges to first-year students. In addition to learning how a hybrid class operates, our ENG 101 students are also (often) learning how Moodle works, learning about campus networks, and, lest we forget, learning the actual content of our courses. If, like me, you have experience teaching juniors and seniors in online environments, some of the issues that arise with first-year students may surprise you. Truly, their difficulties are sometimes greater than the sum of their parts. With this in mind, try new activities in the face-to-face classroom first. Don’t assume all of your “digital natives” know the difference between Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Revise your written instructions for vagueness. Make your office hours as accessible as possible. Work a day at the library into your schedule, even if the semester already seems too short. Hybrid sections require students to weave a smattering of socio-technical literacies together to simply participate in our courses. Taking a moment to reflect on our own acquisition of those diverse literacies may be helpful as we prepare for the upcoming semester.