In the next edition of TYCA to You, we’ll be talking about hybrid composition courses and how they work for you. Interested in offering your two-cents? Here’s what we’d like to know…
1) How does your school handle hybrid courses? Do students have to take orientation to sign up? Do these classes count as a regular course in the instructor work load? Do they have the same seat count as a traditional comp class?
2) What are the pros and cons of teaching hybrid courses? Do they work for you? If so, what makes them great? If not…what turns you off about them?
Please email your feedback to TYCA Midwest’s NCTE Representative, Suzanne Labadie, at [email protected] by May 20th. Be sure to include your full name, professional title, and where you teach. It would be great to be able to include your feedback in the next publication!
Hawkeye Community College does offer hybrid composition courses. Students do not need orientation to sign up which would be good as most of them do not realize they are signing up for a hybrid where work must be done on line in addition to the class work that is assigned. The course count as 3 credits of our 15 credit load and the seat count is the same as face to face courses which is capped at 20.
The pros of teaching composition in this format is that students can do a lot of the peer review and multiple types of writing assignments on line without having to be present in class. The problem I found is that students do not do this. They forget that they have on line work to be done. I think it could work really well, IF students knew they were signing up for this type of class and had the mindset that they would need to do work on line outside of class. In my experience I had terrible retention as most students got behind and then decided to drop.