 Hi everyone, and welcome to this presentation on using Hybrid Flexible Design. This is part of ELI's annual meeting. This is one of the virtual presentations that is taking place today. And I'm presenting Sliced Any Way You Want It using Hybrid Flexible Design. I'm Lance Ian. It's nice to meet you. So I want to start off this presentation by talking about pizza. And of course the question will come up, what does pizza have to do with Hybrid Flexible Design? And I like to think that these two go hand in hand. So let me first start off with what Hybrid Flexible Design is. And that's what we're looking at is when a course is designed to empower students to determine where and how they learn best. Hybrid means mixing face to face with online learning. Flexible means students choose their conditions online, verse face to face, their readings in their assessments within reasonable limits. And so I like to think of this as a pizza and that some people, you know, you can slice it any way you want it. Some people are going to want a veggie, veggies like myself because I'm vegetarian and other people are going to want their sausage and their pepperoni. So we can slice it up however we want. But at the end of the day, it's still pizza. And using Hybrid Flexible Design still gives you a very robust course, but with a lot more options both for you and your students. So how did I get here? Well, I think it's first useful to just talk about, you know, a class typically starts somewhere at some point in time and ends somewhere at some point in time. And in the traditional class, we have the face to face. And these classes or at least my classes typically include some means of lecture, some means of discussions and activities, and of course assessments. I've also taught online for a number of years. And there too, we have a series of online or video lectures, a series of online discussions and activities, and of course, online assessments. Now, what I've done here is I've said, well, can't we marry the two? And this is something different from your traditional hybrid. Hybrid, or at least many of the hybrids that are out there, simply just say, well, we'll trade more face to face time for online time. But in this context, you're not trading out one for the other, at least you as the instructor on preordaining it. I've created a course where students can decide if they want to do it completely online, they can. If they want to do it completely face to face, they can. Or if they want to bounce back and forth from day to day, from week to week, you know, first half of the semester online, second half face to face, whatever they want, they can choose to do that and allow for themselves to determine what works best for their context. And so as I started to design this, this is of course, you know, where I came up with the idea that this kind of looks like a pizza. And that gave me the whole idea of, well, hey, this is about kind of choosing and getting the type of slice of learning that you want. But the course design and process was not without its initial challenges. The first is, of course, organizational, especially if you haven't taught an online course before. You're essentially, you know, you have your face to face course and then you have an online course and then you throw on top of that this mixture that's coming together of the two. So in this case, you know, it is something worth thinking about or knowing about that the initial organization does take a bit of work. It takes a little bit of finesse, but that's okay. I mean, design, it takes time, but usually with really good results. The next challenge was, of course, getting everyone on the same page. Students hadn't heard of hybrid flexible courses before, so this was something completely new. Understanding they could do both or either. Students were sometimes, I didn't sign up for an online class. I didn't sign up for a hybrid class. And my answer would be, that's fine, you don't have to. It can still be a traditional face to face course for you if you so choose. So that was definitely another challenge to consider. And then the final piece was kind of explaining without overwhelming. As I said before, this course has a lot of choices to it. There's a lot of things, you know, they can choose their readings. They can, to a certain degree, they can choose their assignments. They can choose where they come to class. So trying to unload that carefully and, you know, over a period of time or give them certain exercises to help them understand this. That is definitely one of the challenges. But there were a lot of great opportunities. There were a lot of great things that happened for the students. First of all, they got choice. Now, I teach a course in American literature. Of course, I designed this for American literature one. And as much as I think that those texts are important and powerful and relevant to our cultural history, they are boring as all get out. And so having them able to choose the things that they want to read was really helpful. Additionally, it would be helpful for them, helpful for me. Part of the reason why that was helpful for them is that it allowed for opportunities of self-direction. And in this case, I found students were able to pursue certain types of readings that they really liked. I had this one student, he's worked on boats for years. And so every time there was a story or writing or a poem about maritime culture, he was all over it. And he brought that enthusiasm into the class, being able to kind of talk about what was accurate, what was inaccurate, things like that. This setup also allowed for students to get their feet wet with online learning. Right now, the model for online learning, I have a lot of problems with it. I think most schools, they say, okay, you can either take an online class or you can take a face-to-face course. But if you take an online class, if you can't decide if it's for you within the first seven days, that's too bad. You're stuck in the course or you have to withdraw. That I find problematic, that I find challenging because it doesn't entirely make sense. Most online courses, you're not into the thick of it until week three, week four, week five. You don't really know. So something like a hybrid flexible course allows for the students to get their feet wet without fully jumping in. And then, of course, there were some really, really great opportunities for the instructor. I felt really free in setting up this format or in executing the course. First of all, I had engaged students. Students that showed up to the class were engaged. They knew that because there was a smaller number of them, there's an even bigger chance of them being called upon or them needing to own their game. I also, it was great to see the different focus on the content because you have these students and they're each reading potentially different things or some similar things and some different things. It really was interesting to see what we could focus on or what they would want to focus on and really be a sharing and learning experience. It also helped me reinvent or play around more with classroom time. When you have a classroom full of students, each who have done some similar readings and some different readings, there's an opportunity there for students to become teachers, offer them to teach the content to one another, or engage in discussion with one another. Some really powerful opportunities. And then finally, it's great that I'm actually presenting this or talking about this today because I'm standing in my home doing this when I was supposed to be at school today, but classes have been canceled because we have yet another snowstorm. I moved from New England and we have been built with snow the last four weeks to the point in which our Monday classes have not yet met the semester and will not meet until the end of February. My class, which meets on Mondays and Wednesdays hasn't missed a beat. We just keep going because well, when there's no face to, you know, when we can't have face to face class, we take it online. And so we're able to continue to move forward without getting caught up or being challenged by the snow. And that to me, this semester has proved absolutely beneficial and perfect as one of the major reasons why this is really useful. It allows for learning to keep happening and not to be impeded. It really does unleash us. So that's my presentation. Those are my ideas. I hope you found this interesting and relevant. By all means, please send me an email if you'd like to take some further discussion of this or if you wanna take a look at the materials, they're right up there. All right, thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed it.