Report on Hybrid Internet Classes Offered in the Fall Semester of 2008
by Ted Goertzel
Sociology Department
Rutgers University at Camden

I offered two Hybrid Internet courses in the Fall of 2008.  A general description of the courses is here.  The links below go to the schedule and assignments page for each course.  The syllabi are linked from the top of those pages. 
  1.     Methods and Techniques of Social Research - a required course that I have offered for many years
  2.     Cyberspace and Society. 
Each class met in a classroom on four Saturdays.  In-class examinations were given on the last three Saturdays, followed by lecture or class discussion.  There were weekly online quizzes given through the SAKAI course management system.  At the beginning of the schedule, I also scheduled regular chat sessions, but these were not very successful and were discontinued.  There was no time when all students could chat, and the chats tended to focus on details of the grading and quizzes.

In the Methods of Research course I provided weekly narrated powerpoint presentations covering the material.  These were quite popular.  In the Cyberspace and Society course, there were lists of readings but no powerpoints. 

Students had at least two chances on each weekly quiz.  At first, I had these due at 10 a.m. Monday morning, but I found most students put them off until the last minute.  Then I would get anguised emails from students who missed for some reason and wanted an extension.  I changed to a system of offering three chances on each quiz:
  1. An "early bird" due on Friday
  2. A "Saturday Special" due on Saturday at 5 p.m.
  3. A "Last Chance" due Monday at 10 a.m.
The purpose of this was to give students an incentive to look at the material earlier in the week.  On each quiz, the software would tell the students which items they had gotten wrong so they could look up the answers.  They could also help each other and queries were often posted about quiz items on the chat room and discussion list.  The quizzes were intended as assignments for learning;  the closed book in-class examinations tested how much of the material was retained.  There were also some writing assignments in the Cyberspace course and some statistical assignments in the Methods course.  The material on the examinations was quite similar to that on the weekly quizzes. 

The student reaction to these courses, as measured in an online survey, was surprisingly positive.   When to evaluate the Hybrid Internet format of the course, as compared to the same course offered with a conventional format, the students said:

                                           Methods of Research    Cyberspace and Society

1.  I think I did better than I would             38.5%                37.1%
    have done with a conventional course.
2.  I think I did about the same as I             46.2%                37.1%
    would have with a conventional course.
3.  I think I would have done better with         15.4%                25.7%
    a conventional course.
                                       N =         52                    35

I may get a few more answers, but most of the students have answered the online survey by now.

 I believe the slightly greater success of the Methods of Research course may be because it is more highly structured with a narrated powerpoint for each week.  I have been developing this course over the years, making it more and more like a Hybrid Internet course with weekly quizzes.  In the Cyberspace and Society course students had to actually read the material to pass the quizzes, and had to prepare some original writing assignments.  In the Methods course, many try to get by just with the powerpoints.  On the other hand, the Research Methods material is inherently more difficult for most students and they must do computer and statistical work.

The survey required the students to answer two qualitative questions.  Instead of summarizing the answers to these items, I am posting them here:
  1. What did you like about the Hybrid Internet format of this course?   Responses:  Methods   Cyberspace
  2. What would you like to change about the Hybrid Internet format of this course?  Responses:  Methods   Cyberspace 
The survey was not a course evaluation, the course evaluation will be done with the standard Rutgers form later and the results added to this report when they are available.

The test scores in the Methods course are more or less equivalent to those obtained in previous semesters with very similar tests.  I will do a statistical comparison later and add it to this report.  I do not have comparable data for the Cyberspace course offered in a conventional format. 

These results are somewhat discouraging to a professor who has spent much of his career lecturing to students.  Students seem to do just as well without the lectures, and enjoy the freedom of not having to come to class.  I have not reviewed the literature systematically, but studies I have seen say that students do about the same in internet courses as in conventional ones.

 It is a great deal of work to prepare the materials for the Hybrid Internet class:  weekly narrated powerpoints, quizzes and assignments.   One could also do video lectures, but I do not feel the video of my talking head would add much.  Most sophisticated instructional videos, such as one Bob Wood prepared which I assigned, are very useful. 

For many standard courses, instructional materials are already available as packages sold by textbook publishers.  There is no reason why each instructor has to prepare everything himself or herself.   The work of teaching the class, once the materials are posted, is mostly answering emails about grading problems and answering occasional substantive questions.  For a faculty member, I feel the work is less fulfilling which probably accounts for much of the resistance of faculty to teaching online courses.  But I am not sure students should be required to sit through lectures just to make faculty life more satisfying.