Traits of Effective Hybrid Courses

Hybrid Course Design and Deliver > Traits of Effective Hybrid Courses

A well-designed hybrid course typically has many of these traits:

  • Focuses on learners and learning, rather than simply content delivery and testing of information acquisition
  • Places emphasis on learning as an active process, not as passive absorption of information
  • Includes online interaction among students and between instructor and students
  • Has significant instructor presence online throughout the course
  • Uses less than half of in-class time for one-way delivery of information by the instructor via lecture
  • Devotes significant in-class time to active learning including interaction between students and instructor
  • Engages students every week in learning activities and interaction both in class and online
  • Explicitly integrates online (asynchronous) content and activities with in-class (synchronous) content and activities
  • Has frequent low-stakes assessments of student learning at regular intervals with timely feedback
  • Uses rubrics on assignments where appropriate for guidance and for structured feedback
  • Makes possible a degree of student choice over pathways to reach learning outcomes
  • Aligns content, resources, activities and assessment with learning outcomes

From Blended Learning Resources – Center for Teaching and Learning, Oregon State University