Remember the bold predictions made a few years ago that technology would radically change education as well as save money? In reality, technology has had a relatively modest impact in recent years (most classes are still taught in a traditional classroom) and has not resulted in costs savings at institutions of higher education (some might argue that it has actually increased costs). But there is a future for technology yet: certain strategic uses of digital technology are in fact beginning to show potential for educational transformation as well as for cost containment.

The most obvious impact that technology has made on higher education in the past five years has probably been the wide adoption of course management systems, such as WebCT and Blackboard, which offer new and improved services to students and instructors. Although these enhancements, such as online syllabi and lectures notes, electronic grade submission, and virtual office hours, are valuable in streamlining the administrative functions of courses, they alone will not fundamentally transform the university's core missions of teaching and learning.

That's not to say that individual faculty are ignoring the ways in which technology can be used to improve how teachers teach and students learn. As we've described in previous issues of the TLtC webzine, many instructors in the UC system are supplementing their courses with computer simulations and online exercises to give students more time on task, immediate feedback, and richer learning environments. To have a truly revolutionary effect on instruction in general, however, requires that these innovations be scalable to other instructors and courses, and that they be strategically implemented to meet pedagogical goals.

A new strategy is afoot at UC and beyond that may make such a transformation possible. Faculty and administrators are targeting certain courses, namely lower-division introductory courses, for technology intervention not only to improve learning but also to contain costs. They have chosen introductory and general education courses because they enroll very large numbers of students, are expensive to offer in the traditional classroom setting, and their content is sufficiently standard so that it can be taught by a number of instructors.

The strategy being considered - one that has existed for a few years but without a name until recently - is "hybrid" instruction. Hybrid (also known as "blended") is the label commonly used to describe courses that combine face-to-face classroom instruction with computer-based learning in a way that moves a significant part of the course online and, as a result, alters the way classroom seat time is used.

What sets a hybrid course apart from the more common use of technology as a course supplement, or add-on to an existing course, is that it is redesigned to maximize the advantages of both face-to-face and virtual modes of instruction. For example, activities in which students previously engaged in a classroom or laboratory, such as quizzes or pre-lab assignments, are done online instead. This substitution has the potential to lessen faculty and teaching assistant workloads, accommodate various learning styles, personalize the undergraduate experience, and require fewer hours of classroom time.

Because of rising enrollments and budget constraints, some UC campuses are interested in how hybrid courses might ease the burden on facilities, allowing more courses to be held in existing classrooms, as well as in getting students to degree quicker by improving drop/fail rates, which are relatively high in Research 1 universities such as UC.

The national leaders in the hybrid movement, such as the Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University of Central Florida, have found that students in hybrid courses do better than students in traditional face-to-face or totally online courses. Instructors at UW-M have reported that students in their hybrid courses write better papers and are capable of more meaningful discussion of course material.

STUDYING COST AND EDUCATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS AT UCD

In Fall 2000, in preparation for the expected increase in student enrollments, UC Davis began a research project to find out if moving course components online had educational and cost benefits. Known as the Mellon Project because it was funded from a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it involved creating hybrid versions of 10 general education courses and studying student attitudes and performance and faculty workloads. In most instances, the instructor presented the course in the traditional lecture format as well as made course materials, including lectures, available online, so that students could take the entire course, or parts of it, online.

Although the team is still analyzing data, their findings thus far suggest that over the long term hybrid courses may be more effective, in terms of facilities and labor costs, than traditional lecture courses.

"The potential advantage of hybrid instruction from an institutional view is that it is possibly a way to accommodate an increase in students without expanding facilities," says Harry Matthews, co-director and chair of the Mellon Project Advisory Board and Faculty Director, UC Davis Mediaworks. [See his companion article: Hybrid Courses and the Future of Teaching and Learning at UC ]

Michael Maher, a member of the Mellon Advisory Board and professor in the Graduate School of Management, is conducting the economic analysis of the project and has found that hybrid courses may prove beneficial to campuses, such as UC Davis, that are facing increasing enrollments amid tough economic conditions. "One way to look at costs is the way economists do it - start up costs amortized over time. If you look at it that way, you find lower costs for hybrid courses than traditional courses," Maher says.

The impact on student performance and attitudes is somewhat of a mixed bag. The Mellon team has found that students who attend class do slightly better than those who rely on online lectures. "It's statistically significant but it's such a small amount that it doesn't really make a big difference," says Barbara Sommer, co-director and chair of the Mellon Project Advisory Board and lecturer in Psychology. Sommer attributes this finding to the fact that the courses in the project were not redesigned but rather certain components were simply transferred to an online format. "You can put courses online without a serious problem, but to really show some improvement you need to do something more than what we did, which was simply put lectures online," she says. "You really need to redesign the courses to create a rich alternative."

Students liked the convenience and flexibility of having the lecture material available online, says Sommer, accessing it mostly when they missed class or to study for exams. However, students - especially freshmen -- expressed a preference for regularly scheduled, face-to-face classes, citing concerns about procrastination. Also, they stated their perception that a UC education should be based on face-to-face interaction with faculty, not on computer-based instruction. [See companion article: Hybrid Courses and the Future of Teaching and Learning at UC ]

"These are students who have self-selected to go to a residential college -- they are not working full time and trying to fit courses into their busy lives however they can," says Maher. "Online probably doesn't fit their model of how they work."

PERSONALIZING THE UNDERGRADUATE EXPERIENCE AT UCLA

Although there is some variation, the typical large enrollment course at UCLA is often limited to lectures in large auditoriums, self-directed textbook study, and multiple-choice summative evaluations. This creates several difficulties for both students and teachers, says Tamara Addison, a Psychology instructor at UCLA. "Students have different levels of background knowledge. They need regular feedback to know if they are meeting the course goals and large classrooms are anonymous and lack direct social contact," she says.

Addison developed "Undergraduate Technologically Enhanced Student Tutor project," also known as UTEST, which combines the benefits of student tutors with the benefits of high quality computer and Internet technologies, to reduce class time while also providing students a more personalized and rich learning experience.

"Stand-alone electronic modules and distance learning have the benefit of providing standardized high quality learning experiences. They also provide individual flexibility that cannot be attained in the classroom," Addison says. "For example, we wanted students to be able to proceed through the computer learning modules at their own pace. Lesson plans are then tailored to individual students because they can skip through material they already know and review those topics they do not yet understand. Computer technologies can also provide interactivity that is not possible with a textbook or in the classroom. For example, students can engage in hands-on activities and demonstrations and even conduct research online. But such experiences can still be anonymous and fail to induce motivation. Our solution was to provide a supportive environment in which tutors are the link to integrating these technologies in education. The tutors provide individualized social experiences that benefit student motivation and they humanize the large anonymous auditorium experience."

In her Introductory Psychology course last Spring, Addison substituted one hour of lecture each week with an hour of UTEST in a lab, run by several trained undergraduate student tutors. They conducted a scientific evaluation of the effectiveness of the modules in enriching academic motivation and achievement and found that these tutoring sessions were as effective as the lecture. The student tutors also gained substantial personal and academic benefits. "The students valued the new format better and felt that the combination of traditional lecture and computer-enhancement increased the benefit of their educational experience considerably," Addison says.

EXPANDING THE UC DAVIS & UCLA EXPERIENCES

The expertise developed from the UC Davis and UCLA experiments with hybrid instruction is already being harnessed for campuswide, as well as systemwide, benefit.

The Department of Psychology's Research Methods course at UC Davis, although not part of the Mellon project, was a direct beneficiary of it. This course is a requirement for all Psychology majors and minors and also services students in other programs, with a total of 3,000 students a year. The laboratory component required a huge investment of personnel and departmental resources because each lecture session had to be broken into groups of 20. The department simply did not have enough teaching assistants to staff the labs.

Faced with eliminating the lab component of the course, Debra Long, chair of the department committee charged with restructuring the course, along with the course's instructor, Elizabeth Post, decided to develop a virtual lab to preserve the hands-on experience students gained in the traditional labs. They applied for and received a UC Davis Mediaworks grant in July 2002 and worked with its staff to develop the virtual lab, which was offered for the first time this Fall. The Psychology department granted Long release time to develop the lab modules and created a new position of Academic Coordinator, which Post is filling, to oversee the lab.

"Some of the exercises are an improvement over what students used to do in the physical labs because they get more immediate feedback and they can go back and do exercises again. Students also receive a consistent quality of instruction across the sections," says Long. "The disadvantage is that we've lost the writing component of the course. Students used to write a research paper over the course of the quarter. We've pretty much eliminated that because it requires someone to read a paper and give feedback." However, given that the only other option was to eliminate the lab, Long considers the virtual lab a success and will continue to offer it in future quarters.

Long will also benefit from Tamara Addison's experience with UTEST at UCLA. They are part of an inter-campus team, headed by UCLA Chair of Communication Studies Neil Malamuth, that recently received a TLtC planning grant to investigate the possibility of implementing UTEST in Introductory Psychology courses at UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Barbara.

At UCLA, Tamara Addison is just one of many instructors interested in hybrid instruction. In fact, the College of Letters & Sciences is considering launching a pilot project to see if hybrid instruction might improve the experiences of both instructors and students in large courses.

"We really think that hybrid instruction has the capacity to significantly improve the learning experience of our undergraduates, to deepen it, to make it more hands-on, and to have UCLA do a better job of providing an undergraduate education to our students," says Jackson Beatty, professor of Psychology at UCLA and chair of the campus's Faculty Committee on Educational Technology. "With hybrid instruction, we simply can make it better. It's a different ballgame. It's a very exciting one."

If you would like to be updated on news and events related to hybrid instruction, send an email to the TLtC editor with your name and email address.