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Session 1648

Lessons Learned During an Experimental Blended Course by Anthony P. Trippe Rochester Institute of Technology

Abstract

During the Fall 2003 quarter, Rochester Institute of Technology offered a graduate course titled “Operating Systems for Telecommunications.” This author facilitated the course which was conducted in two sections. The first section was conducted in an fully asynchronous distance learning environment. The second section met face-to-face (F2F) once a week while conducting the remainder of its activities at a distance over the Internet. This paper compares the two environments and discusses the lessons learned about faculty and student satisfaction and student performance.

Background

Blended learning programs combine the best aspects of the classroom based format and the asynchronous learning network (ALN) format for course presentation (1). Research conducted at a number of leading higher education schools (2), (3), (4) has reported positive results with respect to faculty and student preferences for more flexible learning. One of the often stated benefits is the increased opportunity for students to reflect on what they are learning. In the blended environment, there is time to think and rethink individual responses. Topic discussions can continue over extended times allowing students to consider and prepare their responses.

In the late Spring of 2003, RIT’s Online Learning Department set out to collaborate with a small group of RIT faculty to design and then evaluate "blended" courses (5). In order to know more about how effective the blended teaching and learning process might be, Online Learning sponsored pilot courses in which a portion of the class time is canceled and replaced with some form of asynchronous (any time, any where) discourse. Experienced distance learning faculty were invited to collaborate with instructional designers in developing a blended course, monitoring key activities to measure success and acceptance, and to participate in disseminating Pilot results to the rest of campus through panel discussions, newsletter articles, and possibly conference papers.

The Blended Learning Pilot Project (6) started in the Fall quarter 2003 with five courses. Four were traditional face-to-face (F2F) classes which substituted at least 25% of the classroom lecture and seat-time activities with online group activities and discussions. The fifth course, which is the topic of this paper, was originally planned as a fully “Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ÆÉ 2004, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Trippe, A. (2004, June), Lessons Learned During An Experimental Blended Course Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13694