The term “standards” is radically variable, like Schrödinger’s Cat, dead or alive depending on who’s looking in the box when. It’s hard to say you’re against standards, but if you’ve been around the CUNY block as often as I have, it’s also hard not to suspect that talk of standards is some kind of code for closing the door on students or regimenting faculty or something still more nefarious (as if anything could be).

So, for my own sake, I have to take pains to say what I’m talking about when I talk about standards, particularly as applied to blended or hybrid (partly online and partly in-class) instruction. In talking about standards, I’m not talking about standardization. This is not about everyone being on the same page, much less the same platform. Teaching styles and strategies and purposes and content differ way too much for that in any modality. Ditto the technologies involved (emphasis on the plural).

What I am talking about is standards as shared expectations — knowing what we’re talking about when we talk about blended or hybrid courses. And I want to be clear that “we” are really not the people I’m primarily interested in here. The critical thing is that students know what we’re talking about when we invite them to take a hybrid or blended course. They should know what this means to the scheduling of their time. They should know what the potential challenges and advantages are.  They should know that they’ll be going on line to do more than just look at stuff between class meetings.

I realize this already constrains some faculty more than they would want to be constrained. Potentially, a hybrid course could be located at any number of points on a spectrum of mixtures of online and in-class. An instructor could decide at any number of points (like the week before) when to schedule some online activity or demand that students show up for a face-to-face session. And if this keeps the students uncertain of what is happening when and where, the instructor so inclined could say it also keeps them on their toes. This mix-it-as-it-comes approach can also be justified as the necessary cost of pedagogical experimentation, of finding just the right combination of online and in-class.

I think that approach is inexcusable, and I want to say that unequivocally. If hybrid or blended instruction is something we are going to do on a large scale, there can’t be endless variability and uncertainty, especially from the students’ perspective. In a game like that, only the professor wins, and at some cost to the students. Academic freedom does not entail the right to do students harm. What’s more, if we are going to take academic freedom seriously, we need to acknowledge that good pedagogy is, to a considerable extent, in the eyes of the beholder. Let’s face it: finding just the right mix of online and in-class interaction will be a never-ending experiment, particularly if we consider differences across disciplines, changes in technology, and so on.

We owe the student some stabilizing principles. There should be clarity in scheduling. There should be a commitment to interaction, both in class and online. The one thing that should be never-ending is the feedback loop.

In writing instruction, there’s the term “enabling constraints” — a coinage of CUNY’s (Queens’) own Judith Summerfield. Students struggle less with an assignment that gives them a sense of form and audience (like writing a letter to someone they know) than with one that simply asks them to write something/anything; obviously, those constraints still leave so much up to the writer.

I think we need some enabling constraints for blended or hybrid courses. I think they should be roughly a 50/50 split of online and in-class. I think the meetings should as regular as standard courses (but less frequent because of trade-off in online time). I think we have to insist on online interaction between student and teacher and/or student and student (and not just student and content). I think we should get hybrid courses defined clearly  in course schedules, and in time so students can see that as they are register.

Some people will think these are reasonable assumptions. Some will think they are abrogations of faculty rights and of the need to experiment. I would like to hear from both, but especially the latter.

Not wanting to end on a semi-pugnacious note, I’d encourage you to check out an announcement in Tony Picciano’s blog on an excellent upcoming national conference on blended learning. And everyone interested in blended learning should have and read Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning, a meta-analysis published under the auspices of the US Department of Education. The gist is that, in terms of learning outcomes, online learning is marginally better than classroom based learning — but blended learning is significantly better. I can think of no better justification for faculty buy-in than that.