Below is a condensed and slightly edited version of five simple principles that help instructors successfully connect their online work with face-to-face teaching. They were developed by Assistant Professor Peter Sands, who taught a hybrid Advanced Writing Workshop as part of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Hybrid Course Project.

What do we want students to be able to do at the end of the semester? When planning major integration of digital communications technologies to a course, careful attention to learning objectives becomes even more important, helping teachers to avoid a counterproductive focus on the technologies themselves.

Simply putting materials on the Web will not guarantee that students engage with and learn from them. You need activities that require students to perform basic academic tasks, such as summary and analysis, and that place them in conversation with each other, such as through responses to each others’ summaries and analyses.

3. Prepare yourself for loss of power and a distribution of demands on your time more evenly throughout the week.

Once seat time is reduced and everyone is online but not in the same room, opportunities to monitor and manage interactions move from the geographic space of the classroom to the temporal space of the week (or month, or whatever unit of time intervenes between classroom meetings).

4. Be explicit about time-management issues and be prepared to teach new skills.

Students must cope with the distribution of requirements over time and with their new dependence on each other.

In a hybrid model, where classroom time is reduced and students engage each other directly online, a conversation can be sustained over several days and even weeks.

If a hybrid class meets regularly, say once a week for a reduced time, then one of the ways to sustain a conversation is to distribute due dates for reading responses and other writing assignments throughout the week, rather than just on the day of the class meeting. If your class meets less regularly in the physical classroom, such distribution occurs naturally because there has to be a set of assignments and goals that keep students returning regularly to the online meeting/discussion space.

5. Plan for effective uses of classroom time that connect with the online work.

Hybrids bring dissimilar elements together to perform the same functions and achieve a shared result. Integrating the online and classroom components is only a short step to increased interactivity in your course. For instance, many teachers bring to class one or two responses from students that were posted online and project those responses using an overhead projector, then discuss them with the class.

Additionally, by sequencing assignments so that they move students from significant discussion/responding online, through written reflections about their responses and the reading, to group or individual projects that are posted to a common learning space, such as a Web site or discussion board, for discussion and elaboration, teachers can have students engaged in doing, rather than just experiencing or reading.

Sands, P. (2002). Inside Outside, Upside Downside: Strategies for Connecting Online and Face-to-Face Instruction in Hybrid Courses. Teaching with Technology Today v8, n6. Retrieved April 12, 2004 from www.uwsa.edu/ttt/articles/sands2.htm.