Although teaching a dual-delivery course is not drastically different from teaching a traditional in-person course, certain crucial concepts underpin the successful delivery of these types of courses. On this page, we discuss the fundamental values and principles that guide your course delivery, and strategies for leveraging tools and features to make dual-delivery more effective.
Fundamental Values and Principles
Beatty (2021) lists 4 important fundamental values and principles that are readily applicable to the dual-delivery setting, in which students are either in the classroom with the instructor, or joining online from home.
- Learner Choice
- Provide meaningful alternative participation modes and allow students to choose between these modes throughout the course.
- In the Dual-Delivery setting, examples of ‘Learner Choice’ include:
- Discussion Boards: students can participate in online discussion boards whether they attend classes in person or remotely;
- Live learning activities: create activities with dual-delivery in mind. Students sitting in the classroom can easily turn to one another for brief discussions. Students at home don’t have this luxury. However, the instructor might consider using the chat or breakout room functions to facilitate communication between classmates.
- Equivalency
- Provide learning activities in all participation modes, which lead to equivalent learning outcomes.
- Think about how you might incorporate flexibility in your learning outcomes so that both in-person and online students can acquire the same knowledge/skills.
- For example, to help students learn to calculate the future value of an investment by applying the concept of “Future Value of Money,” instructors might choose to…
- demonstrate the calculation in person using a whiteboard.
- demonstrate the calculation on video using a transparent board.
- demonstrate the calculation on Excel by creating a walk-through video with screen capture.
- Reusability
- Adapt artifacts from learning activities in each participation mode as ‘learning objects’ for all students; in most cases, there is no need to create different content for in-person vs. online students.
- For example, use the same balance sheet in both live and online asynchronous discussions to help students learn how the different components fit together.
- Accessibility
- Equip students with technology skills and equitable access to all participation modes.
- Ensure that students can access all course components whether they are attending in person or online.
- In the Dual-Delivery setting, for example,
- use surveys at the beginning of the course to gather information on students’ access to the internet (number of hours available per day, connection strength, their current residing time zones, etc.), how much they know about operating the meeting platform (e.g. Zoom, MS Teams, etc.), including logging on, online meeting etiquette, using the chat and breakout room functions, etc.
- consider technical limitations from your survey data in planning learning activities and assessments.
- See also Universal Design for Learning
Strategies for leveraging tools and features in a dual-delivery setting
- Online Discussion Forums
- Use Discussion Boards or Quercus-integrated tools, including PeppeR, Piazza and Ed Discussion.
- Building a community of inquiry by connecting all class members and maintaining an ongoing instructor presence.
- Student communities of learning need to be fostered. They emerge spontaneously in traditional in-person courses but need to be encouraged and planned for in dual-delivery courses where some students may be fully online 100% of the time.
- Use the Flipped Learning design
- Use pre-recorded lectures to provide students with background theoretical knowledge, and help students familiarize themselves with the course content before class meetings.
- Use class time to conduct structured discussions/breakout activities to deepen their understanding while the instructor acts as a facilitator. Design activities to help students contextualize the knowledge, which in turn develops skills and fluency in applying the knowledge to deal with real-life situations.
- Online peer-review tools
- Create opportunities for students to work collaboratively (e.g. collaborative assignments, group projects, case studies)
- The instructor acts as a facilitator by monitoring student interactions and providing feedback to guide students through the learning process
- Breakout activities (online + in-person)
- Breakout activities are a great way to help students generate knowledge through discussions and collaborations.
- Assign specific roles to group participants (e.g. leader, note-taker, spokesperson, etc.), hold the group accountable by asking members to present and discuss their outcomes at the end of activities.
- Design scaffolded learning activities and plan your learning tasks and interactions.
- The instructor takes on a facilitating role and helps students acquire the intended skills/knowledge at their own pace.
- For longer breakout activities (~45 minutes)
- (mixed groups between online and in-person) – send students to physical breakout (study) rooms where every student in the group joins an online meeting (on Zoom or MS Teams).
- (separate groups for online vs. in-person) – send in-person students to physical breakout (study) rooms; online students join their online meetings on their own
- For short breakout “turn around and talk to your neighbour” activities (~2-5 minutes)
- For logistic reasons, it is best to separate in-person and online students in this type of activities
- In-person students stay in the lecture hall and discuss in small groups; create breakout rooms for online students
- Tests and exams
- Consider how students will behave when writing an online vs. an in-person test/exam. Questions that require lower-order critical thinking (e.g. ones under the “knowledge” and “comprehension” categories on the left side of this “Bloom’s Taxonomy Chart “) are easier to plagiarize in an online test. Design questions that recruit higher-level critical thinking (e.g. under the “analysis,” “synthesis,” and “evaluation” categories on the right side of the “Bloom’s Taxonomy Chart“) are more adapted towards both in-person and online formats of testing. However, these questions may lead to more complexity in the grading process. As such, it makes needs more consideration on the part of the instructor to strike a balance.
- One way is to anticipate the thinking process by breaking down a complex question into a set of scaffolded questions that build on one another and provide part marks. This way, the instructor can guide students through the thinking process and assess their learning of the concepts at every step.
- Randomize using Question Banks for online quizzes. Group similar questions (in terms of content, format and points attributed) into Question Banks and using the Question Groups feature in Quercus quizzes to randomly draw questions from the Question Banks.
- Consider how students will behave when writing an online vs. an in-person test/exam. Questions that require lower-order critical thinking (e.g. ones under the “knowledge” and “comprehension” categories on the left side of this “Bloom’s Taxonomy Chart “) are easier to plagiarize in an online test. Design questions that recruit higher-level critical thinking (e.g. under the “analysis,” “synthesis,” and “evaluation” categories on the right side of the “Bloom’s Taxonomy Chart“) are more adapted towards both in-person and online formats of testing. However, these questions may lead to more complexity in the grading process. As such, it makes needs more consideration on the part of the instructor to strike a balance.
References
Beatty, B. J. (2021). Hybrid-Flexible Course Design. EdTech Books.
Bloom, B.S. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives – Handbook 1. Cognitive domain. London: Longmans.
Jones, P., Kolloff, M., & Kolloff, F. (2008, March). Students’ perspectives on humanizing and establishing teacher presence in an online course. In Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference(pp. 460-465). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
Keengwe, J., & Kidd, T. T. (2010). Towards best practices in online learning and teaching in higher education. Download Towards best practices in online learning and teaching in higher education. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 6(2), 533-541.
Wegmann, S., & McCauley, J. (2008, March). Shouting through the fingertips: Computer-mediated discourse in an asynchronous environment. In Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference(pp. 805-808). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
Young, S. (2006). Student Views of Effective Online Teaching in Higher Education Download Student Views of Effective Online Teaching in Higher Education. The American Journal of Distance Education 20(2), 65-77.
Young, S., Cantrell, P., & Shaw, D. G. (2001). Online instruction: New roles for teachers and students. Academic Exchange Quarterly, 5(4), 11-16.