HYBRID COURSES: THE NEW PEDAGOGY OR AN ECONOMIC EXPEDIENT?

by Jack Urowitz

Two local directives have hit us this semester:

* the pedagogical drive to convert 3 hour classroom courses into 2-hour-classroom plus 1-hour-online hybrid courses, and,
* the spatial directive to split 3-hour-class timeblocks into 2-hour-plus-1-hour time blocks.

At first glance these two initiatives seem to be inter-related. And in a trepidatious moment, the 2-plus-1 construction of both initiatives implies a strategy that might eventually reduce courses to 2 hours so that there will never be a SWF with less than 6 sections, and the possibility of more since the language of 11.01 D 2 reads:

No more than four different course preparations or six different sections shall be assigned to a teacher in a given week except by voluntary agreement which shall not be unreasonably withheld.

Consider that fear in light of the college directive that 70% of courses be taught by full-time professors, it's about 50% now, and you have some worried partial-load and part-timers, and future workload forebodings for full-timers. There are changes afoot and no one has salted these new wintry pathways; the footing feels precarious. How many of us heard about or understood the ramifications of the "Swap and Drop" policy introduced into your classroom management this academic year? How many of you even know that students are able to change classes online without an advisor's input?

In response to my queries about the coincidental timing of these initiatives, I was informed that indeed the timing was unfortunate but the space creating timetabling has nothing to do with the pedagogically based hybrid changes. The reasoning behind the split of the 3 hour class into a 2-hour plus 1-hour class is that it would create 11% more space. I pointed out that I often see many empty classrooms and perhaps scheduling should be improved before we ask for SWF time to redesign our courses into 2-hour plus-1-hour delivery format. I likened the problem to raising one's credit limit at the bank instead of rehabilitating one's spending habits; before long the unchecked spending habits will bring you up to the new credit limit. I was given some hope that my objection to the bookkeeping fix would invoke a reconsideration of other options to alleviate the classroom shortage problem.

Hybrid, that is a word that has stealthily crept into our pedagogical vocabulary. At Sheridan, forty-five courses were converted to hybrid this year, a hundred proposed for next year. And will it stop at hybrid or is this just the first step towards a fully online curriculum for Ontario? When you consider that the "The McGuinty government announced the creation of a new Ontario Online Institute in Budget 2010 last March", you can see why the bricks and mortar colleges have plans to step up their online presence. There's a competition looming for online curricula development funds.

What curricula can be better served by online delivery? Is there some curricula that can be delivered online just as effectively, and yet more economically, as in the classroom? What curricula can never be delivered effectively in a virtual environment? And lastly, how much pause is taken to consider those questions in the rush to secure the economic benefits of going online? These issues are discussed from a Labour point of view in the link above and here...

I hope that this context will demystify the rumours and promote discussion about the changes rumbling through the college system. Be assured that your union stewards are well aware of these and other concerns that are part of our professional current events. Here are a few more.

Please note, that since these updates were posted, the Academic Leadership Team (academic managers) has agreed to put the initiative which would have split 3 hour courses into 2-hour plus 1-hour courses - on hold.