The Community College Evolution Toward Blended Learning

Paul A. Eisner

n something like what we would call the beginning, before the Internet spawned true interactivity, community colleges had explored distance education. Cer­tain community college districts were prolific producers of distance course con­tent, including the Dallas Community College District in Texas and the Coast Community College District in Costa Mesa, California. There were cooperatives and consortia that produced and rented commercial-quality courseware to com­munity colleges, usually in thirteen to fifteen half-hour segments. Many univer­sities used similar courseware through public broadcast media; these include media outlets like PBS and local commercial television stations that provided high production support and quality technical systems for educational programming. The University of Maryland, the University of Nebraska, and others had a strong role in the production of telecourses for distance education.

The Maricopa Community College District (MCCD), which serves the greater Phoenix, Arizona, area, was an early pioneer in large-scale commitment to distance education. Rio Salado College, a designated flagship college in the Maricopa system, was granted full authority by its governing board to use dis­tance education; in its founding year of 1978, this involved telecourses, radio courses, and correspondence courses. Rio Salado has over twenty-five thousand unduplicated enrollments in what they still call distance education. Mesa Com­munity College, the largest of the Maricopa colleges, offers over one hundred sec­tions of online courses enrolling about thirty-eight hundred students.

From Analog to Weblog 361

Blended Learning: Simple Socialization

Naturally, Web-based courses were not part of the early architecture of telecourses, so blended learning required the arranging of personal face-to-face discussion or symposia sessions that were sometimes embedded in the course schedule. Most early distance education pioneers quickly discovered that students still desired some face-to-face interaction—with other students as well as the instructor. Dropout rates were often very high and still are, although Rio Salado College boasts an im­pressive 85 percent retention rate; even modern, interactive Web-based courses retain, in too many cases, less than 50 percent of their enrollees.

I often evaluated proposals for courses funded by the Corporation for Pub­lic Broadcasting and the Annenberg Foundation. It was disconcerting to seldom find a telecourse proposal that came in under $1 million for production. The costs of producing thirteen commercial-quality half-hour segments to fit the semester format scared many away from establishing production centers. Luckily, the Dallas County Community College District and the Coast Community College District, with public educational channel КОСЕ, laid out huge expenditures to achieve production capacity. Others followed, such as Miami-Dade Community College and Maricopa, but both districts became sobered by the prospect of such high production costs. Thus, many community colleges rented courseware from the Coast Community College District, the Dallas County Community College District, PBS, and other university providers and consortia.

These experiences shaped a number of significant factors that affect distance education today, such as the emphasis many of us put on course facilitation, which constituted a simpler but more effective learning support. Many discovered that technology does not stand alone very well; although the course segments were often of high production quality, learning support was critical to telecourse suc­cess. Such support included everything from staffing call centers to delivering tape cassettes to homes. In addition, supporting printware was essential. Often the plan­ning processes that went into a successful telecourse far exceeded the preparation we might have found in traditional lecture courses.

Even while designing and implementing adequate learning support, distance education was often attacked for its lack of rigor and general quality by the tra­ditionalists of the academy. Blended learning was virtually nonexistent at this point, save for the attempt to increase opportunities for face-to-face discussion in teach­ing along with the technology. While there has always been a need for this hybrid, it has been difficult for faculty to arrange meetings with students, many of whom are adult learners burdened with jobs and inflexible work hours. Socialization does not eclipse technology, but students seek it anyway. Ron Bleed expressed this need

The Handbook of Blended Learning

in his article, " A Hybrid Campus for the New Millennium" (2001, p. 19): " When we stop for a moment and think about higher education experiences, what we gen­erally remember most often are those moments we connected with the faculty or students." Our problem has been our failure to blend these good social experi­ences with good technology. Bleed goes on to say:

I find it interesting to walk around the Maricopa Community College District cam­puses to see the impact of technology on the students. I recently visited Phoenix College at 7: 30 A.M. I went into the new Library Computer Commons area, and it was nearly full! There were not many students at other places on campus. A day later I went over to Mesa Community College at four o'clock in the afternoon, and the new Eisner Computer Commons Library was bursting with students and activ­ity. If you visited any of the computer labs at our colleges and had some kind of Geiger counter to measure student energy, you would discover that the greatest student activity and energy is now occurring in computer labs [p. 19].

Bleed emphasized blended socialization in describing St. Petersburg Junior Colleges, where they have created " a hard drive cafe, a multi-function, specialized facility centered within an academic office and classroom building. Included in this facility are a one-hundred-station open computer lab, deli lounges both inside and outside, a tutoring center, a career counseling center, and a testing center— all in one facility where food, counseling, testing and tutoring are all intermixed" (2001, p. 22).

Crude Forms of Blended Learning

Early distance education also got caught up in a swirl of enthusiasm for network systems that attempted to integrate voice, video, and printware. At Maricopa, we can recall using a device that enthralled us: an NEC (Nippon Electronic Com­pany) product called CODEX. With an eye-camera on its top, it swiveled to catch live pictures of several students in a classroom. Network facilitators or instructors at the head-in studio could tune the video and sound, conducting a fairly social­ized classroom discussion with his or her lecture, using preproduced material as additional course content. This system worked; however, it took less than a year to jam up all of the channels with courses. An energetic music instructor at one college commandeered and dominated most of the channels, prohibiting other faculty from this somewhat socialized and blended technology.

The above MCCD videoconferencing network was established in this brief heroic history—a cutting-edge socialized technology that became a fading flower

From Analog to Weblog

within a couple of years. Nevertheless, we often boasted during this short period that Maricopa was one of the first higher education institutions to fully integrate voice, video, and print on a network.

Following this early development, some colleges pioneered and developed point-to-point interactive technology. Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was successful here, linking several rural community college sites through such a network. Its investment was considerable and facilitated course de­livery and interaction with students spread across a large rural region.

In Arizona, Northern Arizona University invested in an analog telecourse sys­tem, mainly serving community colleges in rural Arizona. It still operates, but has lost much of its early luster that many policy leaders and legislators often praised. Just when these systems were reaching their peak, the ubiquitous Internet and its Web-based services recast these simple blended technologies with interactive Web-based courses that allowed a richer mix of pedagogy and content.

.

The Shift to Web-Based Blended Methodology

Each year, the MCCD supports a series of services through a group called Ocotillo. The Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (MCLI), a division of educational services, hosts an Ocotillo Visioning Forum. In January 2001, a forum, " Designing the Hybrid Campus, " attempted to define hybrid courses. The MCLI offered this definition:

For many years the discussion on online technology for learning has been seen as an either/or—we looked at it as " traditional" or " F2F" (Face to Face) versus complete online distance learning. In fact, what we know and see being used at Maricopa is that the bulk of instructional technology integration is somewhere in the grey middle ground, a mixing of online technology use and F2F, and what in the latest edu-jargon is called " hybrid courses" [MCLI, 2004, p. 1].

I prefer the definition Roger Yohe offers in an unpublished paper, " Expe­riencing the Best of Both Worlds by Teaching a Hybrid Course." Yohe is one of Maricopa's gifted teachers and the Ocotillo Chair at Estrella Mountain Community College. Yohe feels this definition describes the hybrid courses at Maricopa:

Hybrid courses make significant use of the Web technology to facilitate access to class materials and support communication between faculty and students, among students, and between students and resources. A key characteristic of a

364 The Handbook of Blended Learning

hybrid course is that the communication hub of a course has shifted from the physical classroom to the Web. Hybrid courses are a blend of face-to-face and online learning experiences with heavy reliance on Web technology and tools [Yohe, 2002, p. 1].

Yohe feels that when faculty choose hybrid courses, they are able to discover the structure best suited to them and their students, allowing a compromise of preferences about how best to learn. Other reasons Yohe likes his hybrid course experiences are listed as follows:

1. I really was getting tired of hearing myself talk so much.

2. My redesigned hybrid courses enhanced student interaction.

At Estrella Mountain Community College, faculty believe that the course format is more varied, student performance increased, and student engage­ment was more stable. Yohe quotes Ron Freeman, a humanities faculty mem­ber: " The approaches and tools available in creating my hybrid course provided something I knew was possible and [hybrid] let me do it" (Yohe, 2002, p. 2). Instructors can use interactive media, shift classroom arrangements and formats, pass along the motivation, and, surprisingly, experience higher stu­dent energy. For the faculty, this approach seemed less restricted by a single text of lecture-centered syllabi. Some colleges, according to Yohe, permit and even encourage online learning but do not give appropriate attention to the support required to help faculty. Designing hybrids is a collaborative activity; without cooperation and systemwide sharing, such efforts can be a gigantic struggle.

At Maricopa, support often comes from the Centers for Teaching and Learn­ing (CTL)—innovation centers with varied versions of learning and support for faculty and for students teamed with faculty. Naomi Story says that the Mesa Com­munity College CTL strives to take a nondoctrinaire approach to technology. They will view " interesting failures" as worthy, value-added experiments. Story believes and supports this practice; it is a good mantra for the entire system. The MCLI, centered at the district with the experienced arm of its long-standing Ocotillo Project, allows workshops, visioning processes, research and development, best practice symposia, and comprehensive Web services for faculty and staff. Alan Levine, a talented technology advocate and thoughtful transformist, presides over several data and best practice informative systems. He also summons shared vision communities that focus on effective teaching and learning. Blended and hybrid methodologies have been at the center of many symposia, workshops, and larger Ocotillo successes.

From Analog to Weblog

Roger concludes his paper with both admonitions and thoughtful
considerations: /

As with any new program at a college, the early adopters were ready to go. All of the details for our new hybrid program were not in place, and our motto was (and still is), " Don't punish the pioneers." Early adopters are risk takers— they need support and colleagues to confide in when clarifications are needed.

Three major " lessons" learned from developing a hybrid redesign program are clear:

1. The process of faculty developing a hybrid course leads to instructional improvement in their face-to-face traditional classes.

2. Faculty who receive instruction design support in redesigning courses report more satisfaction in their teaching and better student learning and reten­tion. We must provide the same level of support to faculty with creating hybrid courses as we do with fully online courses.

3. A rich collaborative environment amongst the faculty developing hybrid courses emerges within and across disciplines [Yohe, 2002, p. 3].

The three lessons learned are more than sufficient to justify hybrid course ex­perimentation. But what actually occurs in hybrid courses?

Instructor Variation

In hybrid or blended courses, the course content, facilitation, and mix of method­ologies vary widely. The following examples from Mesa Community College faculty and staff reflect varied approaches.

Rick Effland: Social Science, Anthropology

Rick Effland teaches anthropology and has also taught both Culture and English in China, an experience that enormously influenced his views on hybrid courses. As a long-standing innovator at Mesa Community College and in various leadership capacities in the Maricopa Community College District, he believes that language cannot be taught unless we put it into individual, cultural, and spiritual context. He accepts the common definitions of the terms hybrid and blended, but believes the vari­ations of what learning events or combinations go into hybrid courses are infinite. Effland finds comfort in the three-legged model shown in Figure 26.1.

He reasons that time is a constant factor; the structure of most courses, credits, semesters, and entire schedules is experienced in time. However, in blended courses,

From Analog to Weblog

Roger concludes his paper with both admonitions and thoughtful considerations:

As with any new program at a college, the early adopters were ready to go. All of the details for our new hybrid program were not in place, and our motto was (and still is), " Don't punish the pioneers." Early adopters are risk takers— they need support and colleagues to confide in when clarifications are needed.

Three major " lessons" learned from developing a hybrid redesign program are clear:

1. The process of faculty developing a hybrid course leads to instructional improvement in their face-to-face traditional classes.

2. Faculty who receive instruction design support in redesigning courses report more satisfaction in their teaching and better student learning and reten­tion. We must provide the same level of support to faculty with creating hybrid courses as we do with fully online courses.

3. A rich collaborative environment amongst the faculty developing hybrid courses emerges within and across disciplines [Yohe, 2002, p. 3].

The three lessons learned are more than sufficient to justify hybrid course ex­perimentation. But what actually occurs in hybrid courses?

Instructor Variation

In hybrid or blended courses, the course content, facilitation, and mix of method­ologies vary widely. The following examples from Mesa Community College faculty and staff reflect varied approaches.

Rick Effland: Social Science, Anthropology

Rick Effland teaches anthropology and has also taught both Culture and English in China, an experience that enormously influenced his views on hybrid courses. As a long-standing innovator at Mesa Community College and in various leadership capacities in the Maricopa Community College District, he believes that language cannot be taught unless we put it into individual, cultural, and spiritual context. He accepts the common definitions of the terms hybrid and blended, but believes the vari­ations of what learning events or combinations go into hybrid courses are infinite. Effland finds comfort in the three-legged model shown in Figure 26.1.

He reasons that time is a constant factor; the structure of most courses, credits, semesters, and entire schedules is experienced in time. However, in blended courses,

The Handbook of Blended Learning