1. What Happened to the Chalk? Successful Hybrid Course Development in the Digital Age 1 3/11/2011

2. 3/11/2011 2 Perth, Australia

3. At Bay Mills Community College in Brimley MI we currently run about 80 online classes using the Moodle Platform. But first just where is Brimley, MI??? Your presenters today are Nancy Berkompas and Rick Elder. 3 3/11/2011

4. BRIMLEY MI 4 3/11/2011

5. 5 3/11/2011 Does anyone else here use Moodle? Moodle is a free course delivery program and before Moodle our college created all its own web pages and maintained its own servers for online course delivery. With Moodle we still maintain our own servers, but now we use the Moodle program for class creation and delivery. We converted all the previously existing classes into the Moodle format, and now all instructors at the college have this tool available to them to use if they wish.

6. 6 3/11/2011 Moodle is best for class creation of new content , and I suggest that you create your classes from scratch and do not try cutting and pasting out of any other web program or word processing program. Moodle can be a bit touchy if you do. I tried salvaging all of my classes from the previous course delivery mechanisms that we had and that was not the most successful. If you create a web page (class) from scratch you should be able to avoid lots of formatting issues with colors and font sizes. Moodle is meant to work well for those who are not comfortable with HTML code. If you know some HTML it won’t hurt, and can help.

7. 7 3/11/2011 Now for a view of what can be with Moodle and then we will demonstrate a bit about how to create a class using Moodle. This is my current class for - Introduction to World Regional Geography. This class is a hybrid class and on Mondays and Wednesdays Students meet in a physical classroom for an hour and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays the students do their online work for the class. Here we go … GE 105 – Introduction to World Regional Geography.

8. 8 3/11/2011 The classes which I am in charge of on campus have been historically low enrollment classes, and since the introduction to our campus of the hybridized concept which I first used with a Google based delivery system in the Winter term of 2008 I have not had a class not fill with adequate enrolment to run the class on campus.

9. 9 3/11/2011 So just what is our interpretation of a “Hybrid” class delivery method at BMCC? Hybrid classes combine 50% seat time in a physical classroom with an instructor present (me) and I present a fairly traditional oral lecture to the class about their topics for the week.

10. 10 3/11/2011 Here is what my students do on the off days for the hybridized part of the class. On Tuesday they work on the weekly Discussion Board Question and then they are expected to write a coherent answer to the question of the week . They are expected to fill the text box with single spaced text which is close being one page of double spaced typed text and they also need to use at least one source other than their book, or Wikipedia and cite the source. Then they are to reply to at least one other student in the class about the topic and the reply to get full credit needs to be about ½ of the text box long as far as typed text.

11. 11 3/11/2011 On Thursdays the students in the class write a one page essay using Microsoft Word and then they submit it to me via email. The essays are to be done in the APA Format – This takes care of our college’s “writing across the curriculum mandate.” Students in this class also write a 5 – 7 page topic specific term paper and are expected to use any hybrid time which they do not use on the weekly projects doing online research for their term papers.

12. 12 3/11/2011 What do some students like about the Hybrid course delivery that they do not get in the purely online delivery method? Face to face time with both other students and the instructor. No need to always use email to ask questions. Topic enhanced course delivery that often is not there in the purely online version of the class.

13. 13 3/11/2011 Timely topics like the recent price increases due to turmoil in North Africawas discussed in class, but not in the completely online version of the class. Students in hybrid classes seem to like this. Although Moodle would allow for this to be done it does take time to amend the web pages and then pull the topic out for the next time around when it would be a mute point, so once a Moodle class for purely online delivery is set up and running I do not amend it.

14. 14 3/11/2011 Another item concerning the students liking the hybrid concept is that it does free up their schedules quite a bit. Some students double up on credits this way (not recommended) and some go to a job on or off campus during the off days. It does not matter to me as the instructor what time of day my students do the online course work as long as it arrives by 11:59 p.m. of the day it is due.

15. 15 3/11/2011 Before I turn the presentation over to my co presenter – Nancy Berkompas I will take a few questions from the floor.

16. 16 3/11/2011 Thank you for your time and interest shown in this topic and now here is Nancy Berkompas.