#  Hybrid / Online Classes 

 



Comparing residential and online courses is somewhat of an "apples and oranges" exercise, given the potential large differences in student numbers and demographics. Your choice to offer a course online will likely be motivated by the opportunity to reach more or different students, or the same students in a different way, rather than by issues of course management.

An "online course" can mean any several things:

- A distance learning course is the online analogue of a limited-enrollment, for-credit course.
- A Massive Open Online Course \[MOOC\] is an open-enrollment course, the vast majority of which currently do not provide credit beyond a completion certificate.
- In a hybrid course some instruction is delivered online, but some still occurs in a campus or classroom setting.
- Many variations are possible, such as having all instruction and student work take place online but with in-person discussions, office hours and/or exams.

Online courses can offer many advantages in terms of flexibility and access:

- Instruction may take the form of live video streams, pre-recorded video or audio, text, or student exercises embedded within instructional media, or a combination of these.
- Course development and deployment may be less constrained by the traditional academic calendar.
- If the course allows for it, students can similarly do their coursework with fewer calendar or schedule constraints.
- A larger and/or more varied student population may be reached.
- Online course platforms typically feature data tracking of student access and performance which can aid in learning assessment and educational research.
- MOOCs in particular provide a "large N", allowing for more fine-grained research opportunities such as assessing differentiated instruction and assessment methods.

However, there are possible downsides to online education; many of these are a consequence of the inevitable limitations of having a network mediating all interactions, the scalability to large numbers of geographically dispersed students, or both:

- While online platforms can be used to foster active learning by students, they may also induce student passivity if a course relies overmuch on video-based instruction.
- Interpersonal interactions which occur fairly naturally in a campus setting need to be deliberately engineered online, if they are possible at all.
- Even simple assignments may require having special tools developed in order for students to do them online.
- Providing appropriate feedback to students so they can progress in their learning can be a huge logistical and cultural challenge.
- Best practices for assessing student work, especially in non-technical and non-introductory courses, have not yet been determined.
- The anonymity allowed by only knowing your students and their work through the internet opens up questions of academic integrity and its verification.
- In principle, relying on an online platform to deliver a course may result in a long-term reduction in workload for the instructor(s), but the initial overhead of setting up an online course is usually much higher than anticipated and the long-term time savings may be more than overcome by ongoing course-management and updating tasks.



 



###    For more information...  expand\_more  

 

 [HarvardX](http://harvardx.harvard.edu/book/about)

 [Harvard Extension School](http://www.extension.harvard.edu/)

 [Harvard on iTunes U](http://www.harvard.edu/itunes)

 ["MOOCs on Evidence-Based Teaching Practices for Future STEM Faculty" (Vanderbilt CFT)](http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-guides/online-education/moocs/)

 [The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon](http://oli.cmu.edu/)

 [Khan Academy](https://www.khanacademy.org/)

 [The Great Courses](http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/courses.aspx)

 [Class Central, an aggregator of open online courses](http://www.class-central.com/)

 [OpenCourseWare (MIT)](http://ocw.mit.edu/)

 [A video describing results from Mayer and Moreno's work on multimedia learning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB0W8-I4-7A)

See also their [2002](http://ydraw.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Stop-Motion-Aids-Multimedia-Learning.pdf) and [2003](http://www.uky.edu/~gmswan3/544/9_ways_to_reduce_CL.pdf) Ed. Psych articles