The Spring 2015 Faculty and Student Expectations and Experiences surveys conducted by the CTL strongly suggest that both faculty and students support the scaling up of hybrid/online offerings at Baruch: 86% of faculty reported that they would teach a hybrid/online course again and 74% of students indicated that they would take another hybrid/online class. However, it bears repeating that the CTL refrains from drawing conclusive results from these short surveys, which rely entirely upon anonymous and optional self-assessments. Rather, the CTL will use the survey results to inform their future support, training, and outreach initiatives for increasing access to and maintaining the quality of hybrid/online learning at Baruch College.
Improving the Hybrid/Online Experience
Training Seminars and Resources
Between Spring 2014 and Summer 2015, the CTL conducted five hybrid/online seminars; 31 full-time faculty members and 16 part-time faculty from disciplines across the College participated. Increased participation in these seminars will benefit faculty members preparing to teach a hybrid/online course.
Increasing faculty access to training seminars could also help improve student satisfaction with their hybrid/online courses. Faculty who have taken the CTL or the SPS seminars report more confidence in their ability to teach hybrid/online classes, which may enhance faculty engagement with their courses and increase student satisfaction. The experience of having an enthusiastic, committed, and confident instructor often deepens the learning experience for students.
Student satisfaction with hybrid/online courses at Baruch could also be strengthened by bolstering support services for at-risk students and improving communication about hybrid/online initiatives. Given that such a large number of Baruch students transfer from community colleges and may face more academic challenges than those students who begin as freshmen, the College may want to create specific support structures for transfer students in hybrid/online classes. Additionally, the College should consider how best to convey the implications of hybrid/online instruction among faculty and students. Certainly, hybrid/online courses at Baruch should continue to focus on delivering high quality content through course design and faculty development initiatives.
Although the sample size is small, interviews with several faculty alumni from the CTL training seminars and their students reveal deep and meaningful engagement happening in these hybrid/online courses. In the future it may be helpful to collect data about specific hybrid/online courses in order to cross-reference this information with student evaluations. With this information the CTL could work with faculty who may have received low student responses or poor evaluations. In addition to reaching out to these faculty, the surveys suggest several specific areas to target in future training seminars.
In particular, faculty dissatisfaction with assessment practices and their reported struggles with time management are potential areas for further investigation. Faculty requested that future hybrid/online training seminars include:
- Successful hybrid/online course examples, such as course sites, syllabus examples, samples of student work,
- Models for flipping the classroom and translating lectures into online content,
- Ideas for how to better integrate video into courses,
- Help with course design,
- Suggestions for maintaining student engagement in hybrid/online courses, and
- Workshops focused primarily on specific technology, such as Vocat, Blogs@Baruch, and webcast technology for synchronous online sessions.
Faculty also requested better overall communication about services available at Baruch. Two specific suggestions for improving communication about technology, hybrid/online learning, and digital initiatives were 1) a regular newsletter with information about new and advanced technologies and best practices in online/hybrid education and 2) an online discussion forum where hybrid/online instructors could share their experiences. This could serve as a dynamic archive of relevant resources as well as a local network from which a series of best practices could be developed.
Technology
In the May survey, 83% of faculty and 74% of students reported that they felt comfortable with the technologies they used in their hybrid/online courses. However, the results are more nuanced in response to questions about tech support. While only 43% of students agreed that they could find technical support on campus to help with their hybrid/online course, 48% neither agreed nor disagreed. These ambiguous responses could be due to the wording of the question, which asked students to evaluate technical support specifically for their hybrid/online courses. Students may not have been able to differentiate the general technical support they utilized from hybrid/online-specific technical support. However, the high number of non-committal responses could also reflect the need for clearer communication of the range of support that is available, especially for students. Faculty indicated more positive and fewer neutral responses to questions about technical support. In contrast to the student responses detailed above, 61% of faculty members felt that they received satisfactory technical support and only 25% neither agreed nor disagreed.
Short, open-ended responses on the surveys indicate faculty and students’ desire for:
- Faster turnaround on receiving and servicing computers,
- Increased computer availability in classrooms,
- Improved internet access in classrooms,
- Semester-long laptop loan options for students enrolled in hybrid/online classes,
- More access to tech support, specifically:
- Extended hours for phone support,
- Hands-on help with Blackboard in terms of both course set-up and ongoing instructional use, and
- On-call assistance for synchronous sessions.
It should be noted that some of the requests for extensive hands-on support appear to stem from frustrations with Blackboard and, particularly, Blackboard’s synchronous learning platform, Collaborate. Faculty also noted frustration about spending uncompensated time on learning new technologies and some students reported faculty unfamiliarity with the technology, particularly Blackboard, as a drawback to certain hybrid/online courses.
Faculty Incentives
When asked how to incentivize faculty to teach more online/hybrid courses, the overwhelming response was desire for more pay and grading assistance. Faculty wanted to be either compensated for the increased time spent on their hybrid/online courses or to decrease that time. Credit release time was also often cited as a way to give faculty time to adapt their materials for an online/hybrid course and to participate in a training seminar. A smaller number of respondents suggested having smaller class sizes would be a good incentive. There were also a small number of respondents that felt hybrid/online courses shouldn’t be incentivized at all, but rather mandated.
Helping Students Succeed in Hybrid/Online Courses
Improved communication about registering for hybrid/online courses is the most significant and pressing student need that emerges from the surveys. In both the January and May surveys, over half of students (52% and 54%, respectively) reported not knowing that they had registered for a hybrid/online course. Not surprisingly, students believed this lack of awareness negatively impacted their performance in those courses. Clear communication of the class format is an issue that needs to be addressed by the College as a whole. Faculty also noted that students need to be better informed about the hybrid/online class structure and expectations. Additionally, faculty suggested that students in hybrid/online courses have some prior training on the technologies used in the course. One specific idea that emerged from the survey is to have a hybrid/online day right before the semester begins when professors can introduce their courses and the requirements.
In terms of areas that warrant more research, specific needs of students who might face additional challenges in the hybrid/online mode, such as English Language Learners, transfer students, and working students, should be identified and clarified. More specifically, the survey results suggest that some interesting work might be done around whether fewer transfer students enroll in hybrid/online courses, and if transfer students perform comparably in hybrid/online and face-to-face classes. Additionally, since the results from these surveys suggest that working students not only register for hybrid/online courses in higher numbers, but that students who work many hours per week perform better in hybrid/online courses, future investigations should be conducted to verify or refute these findings.
Finally, faculty teaching hybrid/online courses with high failure and bimodal grade distribution rates may consider taking steps to offer struggling students extra help. For example, faculty may want to broaden relationships with existing campus student support services, offer students multiple ways to interact with the instructor, increase communication with at-risk students, scaffold assignments, administer low-stakes practice tests before high-stakes exams, and provide drop-in synchronous online or face-to-face office hours.
The CTL can continue to provide tutorials for both faculty and students on specific technologies for hybrid/online courses, in-class visits for Blogs@Baruch and Vocat, and individual meetings with faculty to resolve issues and challenges that affect students in hybrid/online courses. The CTL can also help faculty design course websites and syllabi, and offer suggestions and models for communicating expectations about hybrid/online course requirements to students.
Based on the data from this survey and our first-hand experiences with faculty and students, the CTL has envisioned ways to improve our role in scaling up the College’s hybrid/online initiatives while maintaining high educational standards. However, successful educational endeavors in the 21st century require widespread collaboration and clear communication. In keeping with the ideals of cooperation and community, the CTL has created and shared several recommendations for improving the hybrid/online learning experiences with relevant departments at the College.