English department faculty needed to create a template course to support new hires teaching English 1101 in a hybrid format. The faculty’s successful grant proposal for an Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation grant supports a team of faculty, instructional designers, and students creating the hybrid template course.
This project responds to an institution-wide mandate and uses the opportunity to add innovative learning science techniques. In summer of 2021, the institution mandated a review process by which all online and hybrid courses would meet federal standards for accessibility and engagement. In the largest college, 1000-level courses were mandated to meet standards before fall 2022, which meant that all courses scheduled to be taught each semester would have to meet standards first. This college has a long history of eschewing template (formerly known as master) courses. But with the new mandate, it was no longer possible to place last minute hires into the online or hybrid classroom without an approved template course.
The Low Cost ENGL 1101 Hybrid Design Project team earned an Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation grant to support this project. Then, they met to design and enhance a hybrid 1101 template course and wanted to create a high quality template course with low cost materials, copious student success features, and data-gathering capability. The team also wanted the course to function as a training course for faculty who may not be familiar with hybrid best practices. The course would also meet federal guidelines for accessibility and engagement. Finally, the new template would be designed to be “shovel ready” for new hires with features to make it easy to teach successfully:
· a facilitator guide;
· lecture and reminder guides for face to face days; and
· engaging and interactive online activities that minimize time consuming discussion board grading but provide opportunities for students to interact with the content, especially threshold concepts, with relevant and instant feedback.
In addition, the team wanted to share the deliverable globally. Materials will be hosted outside the institution so that they are available for adoption by anyone.
The PresentationMs. Tiffani Tijerina, Program Manager of Affordable Learning Georgia,will lead audience members in a Quizizz game, and winners will receive prizes. The activity will let the presenters share any information that the audience is not familiar with. It will also prepare the audience for the different aspects of the presentation.
Ms. Tijerina will then share information about Affordable Learning Georgia and what makes this grant project important.
Dr. Tamara Powell will discuss the unique team that has been brought together to create the hybrid course and the student success strategies (Newell, et al) that have been applied at various points to support student learning. Following the guidance in the OLC’s faculty playbook: Optimizing High Quality Learning Experiences, the team first sought to design a high quality, hybrid template and then enhance it to support student success. Because students are part of the team building the course, we hope that the final product is exceptionally appealing both to the faculty adopting the course and the students taking it.
Dr. Jeanne Law Bohannon is the architect of the data analytics portion of the project. The team chose Everyday Writer/Achieve as the textbook for the template course, which will save students 73% in course materials costs compared to the current book most often used in ENGL 1101 courses at the institution. In addition to cost savings, Achieve also provides robust data collection features.
A very recent study “of 215 community college students enrolled in online, introductory courses” supported the research that OERs promote completion and retention (Bol et al 17). Bol et al found that students in OER sections of an online Introduction to Communication course were 34% more successful than their counterparts in non-OER sections (21). Persistence rates (students finishing the course) were 40% higher for students in the OER sections (22) and their exam scores were slightly higher (23). This study supports findings in other studies that show that OERs support student success, retention, completion, satisfaction, and learning outcomes. Through this project, we will provide these advantages to students in ENGL 1101 hybrid sections. Our hope is that increased satisfaction and success in an introductory writing course will support strong student writing throughout the college careers of our students. This improved skill set will lead to better performance in all courses, higher graduation rates, and better career outcomes.
OLC occurs near the end of the semester for this pilot phase of the project, and the presenters will share how the project is going and whether or not it has achieved the trifecta of affordable course materials, template courses, and data analytics to boost student success in the English 1101 classroom, and what changes we will make to the next iteration of the course and to the English 1102 hybrid template that we are developing.
After these short presentations, we would like to break the audience members into small groups to discuss with them 1) their experiences with open educational resources, 2) what features they believe facilitators of these courses would like to see, and 3) given the data collected so far, the proposed changes in the spring 2023 version of the course, 4) given their unique perspective, how can we optimize the course for continuous improvement?
After small group discussion, we would like to get back together as a larger group and summarize the outcomes of each discussion. We hope this exchange will spur additional improvements in the template, and we hope we can join with other adopters around the world to continue to collect feedback and improve the project—to design, enhance, and optimize.
Works Cited
Bol, Linda, et al. “A Comparison of Academic Outcomes in Courses Taught with Open Educational Resources and Publisher Content.” Educational Researcher, vol. 51, no. 1, Jan. 2022, pp. 17–26. EBSCOhost, doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211052563.
Newell, Julie R., et al. “Time-Efficient Techniques for Improving Student and Instructor Success in Online Courses.” International Journal on Advances in Intelligent Systems, vol 14, no. 3&4, 2021, pp. 193-207.