Establishing Community in Hybrid Courses

Abstract

The context: I use this strategy in all of my hybrid courses, which are composed of 50 percent face-to-face and 50 percent online contact hours. The courses consist of ten to fifteen students, most of whom are preparing for ordained or lay ministry. The pedagogical purpose: Students are given the opportunity to meet and interact with one another and to form and lock in relationships, in order to form a strong sense of community within the learning environment of the hybrid course. Description of the strategy: In the face-to-face sessions of all my hybrid courses, I intentionally replace lecturing and traditional modes of seminar discussion with community building activities. The following activities that I use are designed to simultaneously cover course material and establish community: student-led plenary prayer, aesthetic small group assignments (for example, each small group creates a poem, play, drawing, or song based on course material), field trips, movie viewing, peer-collaboration to design innovative programs for their ministries, and small-group sharing of “in-the-field” ministerial tactics. When the face-to-face session is long enough (over two hours is ideal), I encourage students to bring snacks or food for a meal to share in pot-luck style. In each course, I tailor any one of these activities to suit the material we cover. For example, in my Sacraments course, when we watch the film, Babette's Feast (Orion, 1987), and discuss the “sacramental principle,” I ask the students to bring a food that signifies something important about themselves they wish to share with the class. Why it is effective: In a hybrid learning environment, wherein face-to-face contact hours are reduced by at least half of those in “traditional” courses, supporting a sense of community is critical. Especially at the beginning of the course, before venturing out into disembodied cyberspace, students need to feel connected to their peers and to their instructor. Sustained community building activities allow for real-time personal interactions, which utilize a range of multiple intelligences. The activities also establish a positive environment for collaborative learning, thereby enhancing the quality of social presence in discussion forums and virtual prayer rooms in the online component of the course. Students also have a clearer sense of the instructor's expectations, because they have personally interacted with the instructor and have witnessed the instructor's facilitation of various and diverse classroom activities and dynamics. Ultimately, the community building activities display to students in formation a mode of integrating their intellectual understandings of course material with their interpersonal, spiritual, and pastoral growth.