from Jan Schwartz
Last blog I explained how I constructed Practice Management 2 for the acupuncture school where I teach. This time I’ll talk about Practice Management 1, which was constructed quite differently.
Half of this class was conducted face to face and half of it online. This was an experiment necessitated by my heavy travel schedule last spring. I used the first class period, which was face to face to explain to the students how to access the course; I gave them their log in information and then showed them how to navigate through the course. Again, I hooked up my computer to the “big screen” so they could see what I was doing. They then logged on using their own computers.
Practice Management 1 is a course about marketing, identifying target markets, creating an elevator speech and working with other health care professionals. And the course has more outside homework assignments than Practice Management 2. I thought about having the students upload assignments to the course site, but I had enough face to face classes with them that I decided sharing in person would be better. The course site housed the readings, or more often than not, the URLs to find what I wanted them to read, and of course it also housed the discussion forums.
The fun part of this course for me was that I was able to find lots of websites, blogs and discussion forums that were relevant to the topics we cover in marketing. Most had nothing to do with acupuncture per se, but were relevant to service occupations and / or health occupations, and it was easy for the students to connect the dots. Some students decided that blogging might be fun and others thought it was worse than public speaking! No one wanted to Tweet. The learning outcome was that they learn how to use some of the social networking tools so that they could decide what might work for them. If they chose to engage with social media, then I required them to have a strategy for how and why they would use it. We had some good discussions online about the need for a web presence, whether they were keen on it or not. I mean who uses the three-inch thick yellow pages anymore?
I hope to be able to teach this course as a hybrid course next year too and eventually move it to being delivered fully online. It is so much easier to update an online course with new information as things change in the social media marketing field, and they are changing! I found it easier to use materials I located on the internet (all under creative commons licenses) than to have to supplement a textbook. However, I do agree that in some cases you will want a textbook–I use one for Practice Management 2 as a supplement where seeing forms, lists, and examples are useful to the student. In this case the text becomes a supplement to the course material rather then the reverse.
If we do get to that place where the class can be fully online, then I will have the students upload their homework in a way that allows for sharing with the rest of the cohort and provide a space for them to comment on each other’s work.
What are your experiences with hybrid courses?
Photo credit: Flickr, cliff1066
Tags: education, elearning, hybrid education, marketing, online courses
