Challenges for Hybrid and Online Courses

By Cindy Royal, Ph.D., 
Professor & Director, Media Innovation Lab 
June 8, 2020 
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In early March, having just returned from a trip to New York City and amid growing concern about the pandemic, I began to consider options for completing the semester. I kept thinking “just get to Spring Break, and we’ll regroup.” During that time, in Austin, the annual South By Southwest Conference and Festival was canceled, and this was the first realization that we were dealing with something bigger than we originally anticipated. As time went on, and more activities were canceled or postponed, we began to grasp the magnitude of a contagious disease run rampant across the U.S. and globe.

I was teaching two courses as a hybrid during the Spring semester: Digital Media Innovation Capstone and the Digital Media Design graduate course. While half of the sessions in those courses were originally planned to be taught online, the in-person segments were critical to the learning outcomes, as the course was initially conceived. A third course, Mobile Media Development, was meant as a completely in-person experience in a computer lab. I discuss the ways each course was adapted and re-conceived.

Digital Media Innovation Capstone

While the Digital Media Innovation Capstone class was originally developed as 50% online/50% in-person this semester, the in-person activities were the heart of the course. We have group work, brainstorming and other design-thinking exercises. Luckily, we had finished most of those activities during the first part of the semester. I wanted to maintain contact with the students, so I decided to have weekly Zoom check-ins with them, but moved all my lectures to pre-recorded videos. I wanted students to be able to access the materials when they could, and be able to manage whatever technology and Internet connection issues they may be having in the places in which they were isolating. 

We were in the midst of group research projects when the semester was disrupted. Students used various tools, some that I set up (Basecamp) and some they adopted (messaging apps and emails) to maintain the necessary communication to assemble these projects. All instructors know that group projects rarely go without some conflict or discrepancy, but I was happy that these projects ran more smoothly than in the past, with virtually no complaints and all being turned in on deadline.

I am pleased that several students from this course have secured positions: marketing social media specialist for a personnel agency, social media brand ambassador for a law firm, audience development producer for a startup media organization and social media coordinator for a major social analytics platform company. Others are actively in the process of interviewing, so this is encouraging for the career prospects of our recent graduates.

Digital Media Design

The Digital Media Design course is a graduate-level class in introductory web design concepts. Our graduate program recently moved to offering most courses in a hybrid manner, so this was the first time this course was taught 50% online. The course covers HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding, responsive design, the Bootstrap frontend framework and basic multimedia editing. 

This was a small class and all students had access to computers and the necessary software they needed. The university provided the Adobe Creative Suite for students, so they could access Photoshop and Premiere for image and video editing. All other tools were free, online coding tools (html editors like Brackets or Atom) or tools to which they had free access (Fetch or FileZilla). I still met with the course during our regular time on a live Zoom, but tried to keep sessions to 30 minutes or less. That did not always happen, as some discussions of topics went longer than others. But because we had covered the foundational elements during the first part of the semester, most students had a good basis for completing the course. I did have to review code with students either on Zoom or separately and provide recommendations for solutions. I missed the opportunity to talk with them in the lab about the vision for their projects and provide direct assistance with problems, but all students were able to successfully complete the class and turn in good projects.

The final projects in the class were a multimedia reporting project, which also presented challenges for students in their reporting and dealing with sources. But students found ways to make sense out of their personal situations and tell unique stories about their or others' experiences dealing with the pandemic.

Mobile Media Development

The Mobile Media Development course uses the Apple program XCode and Swift programming language to create iPhone apps. Due to the focus on the Apple platform, the course requires the use of Mac computers, so we normally teach this course completely in person in a Mac lab. This was a big worry for moving online, but I quickly assessed that the majority of students owned Mac computers, and I was able to round up a few MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs to lend to the four who did not.

Still, this class was going to be a challenge without being able to help students directly in a lab. In a computer lab, it is a challenging course to teach, as the XCode and Swift platforms are more advanced coding concepts. The platform is unique in how it handles errors and troubleshooting. Once I knew all the students had computers they could use in their respective homes, I was still concerned about them being able to execute working projects. I decided to change the requirements for the final project to remove the third segment of lessons on using a cloud-based database as a requirement. I still exposed students to these topics, but made them optional for the final project, which none of the class tried. That is understandable, because there were many aspects of these lessons that really needed to be handled in a lab on consistent platforms and with readily available assistance.

Prior to Spring Break, I had covered most of what needed to be addressed in terms of creating a multi-screen app that passed data across scenes. I continued meeting with the students once a week on a Zoom for a check in, to be able to answer any questions and to help them understand issues and requirements for creating and turning in projects. I spent time working with students via Zoom and through email looking at their projects, helping them troubleshoot error messages and figuring out functionality problems. 

In a final wrap-up post for the course, students expressed the following sentiments about missing the in-person sessions during the final weeks of the course.

“While using the borrowed Apple computer has certainly been helpful, trying to navigate the computer system without the help of teachers and peers sitting right next to me, who can help with not only Xcode, but Apple in general, certainly steepened the learning curve for me.”

“I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing we were able to continue instruction in class, as I feel we had to miss out on things we would have only gotten from being in-person.”

“I think the game app was the most enjoyable because we were in class and able to help each other and get ideas from each other, but I have still enjoyed the class in the online format.”

These comments reflect the value that students in this course place on the in-person experience that includes both instructor assistance and learning from one's peers.

Reflections 

In a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 60% of faculty felt that Spring 2020 courses were inferior to face-to-face offerings (June, 2020). The results indicated that creating engagement with students was one of the most challenging aspect of moving online. However, many indicated confidence in teaching online in the future, with more time to develop online teaching skills and prepare courses. 

Like others who have made the abrupt shift to online courses mid-semester (Radcliffe, 2020), I have had a chance to reflect on the experience. Here are some of the things I found in moving these courses online and supporting students in completing the semester:

• Students rose to the occasion. In all courses, students did more than I expected, solved problems on their own and turned in excellent projects. I think this is the result of 1) not having as many normal distractions with bars, parties and friends; 2) their anxiety about career plans caused them to put more effort into developing strong portfolio elements. I am proud of the work students turned in this semester, some of the best projects I have seen. 
• Live Zoom sessions proved more valuable than I originally thought. When I first embarked on the online portion of the semester, my goal was to provide most of the lessons as pre-recorded videos, so students could access them whenever they were able. But the weekly check-ins, guest speakers and Q&A sessions offered a return to a semblance of normalcy that most students seemed to crave. I recorded most sessions (unless the guest speaker wanted to be off the record), so students who were not able to make the live session could view it later. However, I was surprised that attendance was quite good for the live sessions, although participation was uneven.
• Video on or off? I didn’t require students to have video on during the live sessions. This didn’t help the engagement of the class. But since students were possibly in less than ideal situations, I didn’t require this. For future online courses, I plan to require (or strongly encourage) that students are present via video during live courses, but I will commit to keeping the live segments short.
• Alumni to the rescue. In addition to the sessions I held with students during the live Zooms, I also recorded several more interviews with alumni who worked at Texas Tribune, New York Times, Texas Restaurant Association, H-E-B, USAA and more. They discussed work-from-home strategies and gave students advice. Every one responded instantly to my request and was more than willing to share their experiences with students. I encouraged students to connect with alumni via social media, as many expressed willingness to support students during this crisis.

Alumni from USAA 
Becky Larson, UX Designer, and Rebekah Gould, Senior Product Manager

One student commented in a final wrap up post:  
“I felt the course went above and beyond to prepare us to start careers, which I am grateful for. In particular, I think the meetings with professionals over the last several weeks have been some of the most engaging and useful content I could have asked for.”

• Coding is hard to teach, online AND in person. The most difficult concept to emulate in an online environment was the personal assistance with coding that I am able to offer students in a lab. But most students were ready to embrace the idea of solving their own problems. For the ones I needed to assist, I was able to work with their code on my own or via Zoom and help them figure out what they needed to do. I reiterated, over and over again, some of the techniques for solving their own coding problems: reading the error messages, isolating the problem, checking for conflicts, testing their projects at each step. But these are the same techniques I have to emphasize when I teach the course in person. Being on their own encouraged some students to gain more tenacity than they would have if they had someone to instantly assist them and better prepared them for a future in which they will have to execute self-teaching over their career. Many technology and programming topics are taught in an online manner through other platforms and that is the main way that I update my own skills, so teaching these topics online is not that far-fetched or unusual.
• Communication, as always, is key. Being clear about communication modes (email, Slack, a learning management system) and redundant in your messaging is the key to any successful educational environment. It is critical in an online situation, particularly one that was not necessarily planned as online at the outset. 
• Having held courses as normal for the first part of the semester was key to the successful completion in the Spring. In most cases, foundational elements were already covered, and during the last five weeks we were able to apply these concepts. This will be different in semesters when we will be teaching courses online from the beginning. But we’ll have time to adjust to how we build the foundation and must consider how to best simulate the in-person experience in a virtual environment. There will always be new approaches and ways to consider improving online delivery, which means continuous learning for faculty.

Teaching online is just like the digital skills we teach students. It reflects a problem to be solved. It is difficult, but not impossible, and there are ways to teach more course topics online, if you are creative and willing to experiment with tools. You also need to be flexible and empathetic for students’ situations. And you need to be careful with yourself. Mistakes will be made. You will work hard. You will learn things that you will improve the next time. These are skills that all faculty are going to need to develop as we move forward.

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References

June, A.W (2020, June 4). Did the Scramble to Remote Learning Work? Here's What Higher Ed Thinks. Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Did-the-Scramble-to-Remote/248928

Radcliffe, D. (2020, May 16). Lessons learned: 9 takeaways from teaching online during COVID-19: Tips for remote instruction developed in the past 10 weeks, Medium. https://medium.com/damian-radcliffe/lessons-learned-9-takeaways-from-teaching-online-during-covid-19-8400cc3b36b0.