Hybrid Course Reaction

When I searched on Google, “Hybrid/blended courses,” I was surprised to find how many different listings there were. Most of the results were from educational organizations ( .edu), but there were some other sites pages that were made to explain the point of hybrid courses. My very first result was from The University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. The link led me to a page that was explaining hybrid courses at UW-Milwaukee and offers student resources. I navigated my way to come across an example class called “Cross-Cultural Study of Religion” from the department of anthropology. They also had a graduate class called “Advanced Nursing Practice Interventions” in the College of Nursing. Both of these classes say in the course description that two-thirds of the classes will meet in person, while one-third occur online. This is different to LIS 201 because we have no online lectures. Although we spend lots of time communicating online through our blogs and writings, we are never required to be attending online classes. I think that the way LIS 201 is taught is much better than having a setup like UW- Milwaukee’s hybrid course. I really liked how we would blog online and comment on each other’s posts, but then when we had class we would reflect on the work. I think the in-person reflection called for more constructive criticism because I felt that the comments were all very similar saying, “I agree with that point because…” “I really like this post, Great Job.” But when we got to sit down and meet face to face, it lead to deeper analysis and feedback on our writing. Therefore, I think I got to know more about my peers in the face-to-face parts of our class. Since I took LIS 202 last spring and there were a lot of similar blog and wiki skills to be learned, this class reinforced my knowledge of these skills and made it so I will remember them for a much longer time. I believe doing all these tasks for a second time made me very proficient with the tools. I think that blogs and wikis are great tools for education use, but only for the right type of class. For English and Journalism classes, I think incorporating these tools would be very beneficial. However, it would be a nightmare to have my Business and math classes on blogs. I believe that for the most part the readings were hit or miss. Sometimes after reading I would be going back over my notes to make sure I understood the important parts and other times I would be thinking, “Why did I just have to read that?” For example, I think the social structure Van Dijk reading was full of material that was all very relevant to our curriculum. Often times it would be the shorter or news articles we had to read that would be slightly related, that left me thinking it was a waste of time.