Classwork v Homework in BL Courses

Week 1 in the #BlendKit14 MOOC has been devoted to defining blended learning and determining the learning outcomes for our courses. Here are my learning outcomes for 101:

I missed this week's discussion board, as I joined the course a week late, but I read through the very active discussion on defining blended learning. It was interesting to watch people work through some confusion between flipped classrooms, blended learning, and hybrid learning. The distinctions between flipped and blended has always been clear to me, but I've also always emphasized the difference between classwork and homework, something that I think has helped me conceptualize my course and, I hope, has helped students understand it, too. In a flipped classroom, traditional homework activities are done in class, and "content delivery" happens through video lectures, etc., at home. The seat time is the same, however. In blended, on the other hand, a certain percentage of face-to-face seat time is replaced by online learning--and that learning is "class," not homework. I spend a whole page on this in my syllabus, which I may add here at some point to demonstrate how clear I need to make this for students (and me, for that matter). It's structured exactly like a f2f class, really:

MW class schedule: two 75 minute classes per week. In between the two classes is homework, so:

Monday class

HW for W

Wed class

HW for M

The only thing that's different is that the Wednesday class is online. The thing that makes it work is that all classwork must be in by midnight on Wednesday. That's critical to maintain the distinction between "homework" and "classwork." Critical!

If there's one thing I can pass on to anyone about to take on blended learning, this is it: define your online classwork as classwork and make sure students know that it's due on the same day. That way, the online classwork will feel different than homework. Seriously: I cannot emphasize this enough. It's too easy for blended classes to feel like "so much work." It's not so much work if you make sure that you're only asking students to do seventy-five mintute's worth of work during the online class (e.g., one ten-minute video lecture, an activity, and an ungraded quiz). Bonus: try to have the stuff that students do for the online classes different than what you normally assign for homework. This isn't always possible, but it's helpful. For example, I never assign readings during class--readings are homework activities. Videos, however, are usually class activities, not homework activities. Make sense?

Here's the other artifact we created this week, which is related to this distinction (somewhat): 

The glue between OL and f2f classes is the discussion boards. This is something I need to work a lot on; the discussions that my students have on those boards are fantastic, yet I don't bring them into the f2f classes nearly as

much as I want to.

I'm working on this (right along with incorporating the readings more explicitly in class, too). I'm getting there... and little artifacts like these help me keep my eye on what "there" looks like.

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