As many courses are held in a hybrid format during the semester, here’s a few tips to consider as courses are being prepared and as they run during the semester.
Holding Hybrid Meetings
- In the Canvas course, define what students will need to do before a class meeting, during a meeting, after a meeting, and online. This will help reduce confusion about what tasks are to be accomplished and in what location they are to occur. Be as specific as possible when conveying this information.
- Create your split class schedule (example: class “A” meets on Tuesday, class “B” meets on Thursday) for face-to-face lesson planning. Consider:
- Do you teach the same things during different class sessions in a week, or do you teach different things in each class session?
- If you teach different things in class sessions across the week how will you handle the students who are not present?
- Plan to effectively use face-to-face class time. Place most lecture and related materials online for students to review prior to any face-to-face session. Consider pre-recording lectures (or parts of lectures) before class sessions for easy student review. Dedicate face-to-face class time to interactive activities, discussions, and other skill building.
Place All Materials Online via Canvas
- As instructors may be using a variety of rooms during their hybrid course, it’s best to avoid leaving files directly on a campus podium. Consider storing all course related files in Canvas, on a portable drive, or in cloud storage.
- Store any course materials in Canvas, even those materials intended to be used when in the face-to-face part of the class. This helps save a tree by cutting down on printing and prevent the potential transmission of germs. Also, please remember that individual students may need an accommodation based on their personal situation – having all materials in Canvas helps in planning for this eventuality.
- Review your course schedule and identify any activities that can or cannot be easily transitioned to a fully online environment. Make early decisions on how a class can be moved fully online, if necessary.
- Practice holding a live session via Webex or your conferencing tool of choice. Running a synchronous session once can help determine potential use & technical issues and can help determine fixes to avoid these issues later.
Canvas Specific
- Provide all students with general language on how course content is published, how due dates will work for any split class groups, and how content is to be accessed.
- Canvas can use different due and availability dates for students. An instructor can set up multiple Assign To fields with different students having different dates. Please note that all students would need to be added manually to these fields, and they can not be copied from assignment to assignment.
- Review Quiz feedback settings to ensure that feedback about correct answers or a student’s own answers are not released right away. Set Canvas to release any feedback after the final due date for the Quiz.
- In Grades, enable & use the notes column to help identify students in different class groupings.