Hybrid Homework – Blending Blended Learning and Face to Face in four Undergraduate Education Programmes

Abstract: This paper presents a research-based development of learning designs that seek to deploy the best of both face-to-face and e-learning. That is the elements of face to face (f2f) courses that we acknowledge as productive from prior research and experience combined with the elements of blended learning that we see work in e-learning and MOOC contexts. We call it ‘Hybrid Homework’ because it is a cross between traditional homework and virtual e-tivities that include other ways of creating activities and gaining participation in the timespan between presence-lessons. The context of the paper is four undergraduate programmes at University College North in Denmark (UCN). The four programmes share a work/profession linked relay between theory and practice, which also makes it relevant to deploy other, virtual, ways of creating activities and participation in placement and internships than the traditional f2f programmes would normally do. The paper presents an incremental progression form the first makeshift experiments to the latest research-based designs. The paper also shows a constant struggle to exploit and deploy e-learning techniques without ‘becoming’ actual e-learning programmes. This proved difficult. On one hand, the programmes in the study should not come across as de facto blended learning programmes, on the other hand, the programmes must offer full programmes on all campuses, regardless of the number of students. So, the question is how we can develop learning designs that make it, pedagogically, financially and practically possible to offer full programmes and still maintain the students’ experience of high-quality courses. Our studies imply that the students regard e-learning/blended learning as low budget/low quality and that it requires high levels of self-efficacy and motivation, which the students fear they may not be able to deliver. Conversely, the learning designs developed in this study must make teaching and learning at a distance possible without a decreased experience of quality amongst students, who enrolled to a traditional f2f programme. In order to offer a pedagogical solution to a complex problem, we suggest an incremental introduction to the principals and techniques of the virtual part of the courses that allow the students to get used to learning through ‘Hybrid Homework’. Furthermore, we suggest a uniform and simple ‘hybrid homework design’ that carries a great resemblance from course to course making it simple for the student to recognise her/his role and what is expected and intended. That is, few, simple and productive digital tools utilised the same way by all lecturers that constitute an easily recognisable ‘Hybrid Homework design’ in which the students can learn and collaborate.