You've come a long way baby....

Hello friends and fellow bloggers-fortunately, my income does not depend on the frequency of this blog or I would be penniless! My faculty and I have learned so much in the past 4 years, I can't even begin to tell you--but, this is a blog, and of course I will try. I dedicate this post to the College of Healthcare Sciences faculty at Nova Southeastern University who are engaged in our "Hybrid 101" class-a faculty development class for teachers interested in transitioning their class from traditional to hybrid.

What have I learned since my last post? Here are my "Top 10"-

10. Find ways to keep your students engaged: Doing an online lecture? Ask "Stop and Think" questions-encourage students to push the PAUSE button and really think about the answer. The online environment is an excellent place to encourage thinking, reflection, and metacognition. Or, post a question and ask students to text you (yes, I'm serious) the answer---for those unwilling to give out personal phone numbers, consider using a program like Google Voice instead of your own phone number. When I share you-tube videos, I sometimes direct students to pay attention to certain aspects of the video.

9. Be a lifelong learner, ie, never stop learning what else is out there! Today I learned about "Glogger" and can already picture using it for student presentations or even mini-lessons/cases in our curriculum. Learning new Web 2.0 tools helps me push the "refresh" button and re-imagine my course delivery and student assessment practices.

8. Share your learning with your friends and colleagues. I love the idea of sharing between colleagues in this rapidly expanding world of hybrid education. That is one of the reasons in our HE-DPT Program, we use pre-game meetings to plan and post-game meetings to evaluate/discuss our course outcomes.

7. Create consistency in the way you organize courses in Blackboard or any course management system. For the first few years of our program, students complained how different each course was organized and how hard that made it to adjust to each class. We insisted that faculty should have the right to individualize their blackboard classroom. Yes, HUMBLE PIE is tasty. We realized that there is much to be gained for having consistency within our program-that is, all course material is organized on the Course Content page; keep all links under course content, etc. Students now spend less time "looking" where assignments are posted, etc.

6.  Help keep students organized. We now all post a weekly "To-Do" list that reminds students what is coming up that week. WHAT-you don't think doctoral students need reminders? Our working students sure do-in fact I could use a few reminders myself. Faculty in classrooms do those verbal reminders all the time--why not in the hybrid classroom?

5. Use your vacation days! Enough said!!

4. Disconnect from email every now and again. You will thank me for this.

3. To use videos within a course management system like Blackboard, create video links to you-tube so that you don't bog down the system. Your students will thank you.

2. Shorten your online lectures. It is more engaging to have 3 30-minute lectures than 1 90 minute lecture. Better yet, keep them all under 30 minutes. You've read the data on attention...

1. Embrace face-to-face time: give students a chance to laugh (in real time), ask questions, give opinions, and get feedback. Online learning is wonderful, but it lacks the spontaneity and human touch of F2F environments. Plus-students appreciate being with you (really, they do) - especially because they are not with you every week. Let them get to know the F2F you as well as the virtual you!