[The Montana Professor 23.2, Spring 2013 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Jason Allen Snart
Denver, CO: Praeger, 2010
179 pp., $34.95 hc
Marvin Lansverk
Professor of English Literature
MSU-Bozeman
Online learning has become so ubiquitous and comprehensive, rarely do individual books address "the plenum" anymore. Instead, in Aristotelian fashion, taxonomies have been created and continue to be generated, sorting the online educational field into smaller units, issues, and aspects capable of being treated in a single volume. Among these differing sets of taxonomies are the degree to which online components are used in a course, from full to partial—from completely replacing face-to-face contact to supplementing the traditional classroom. Jason Allen Snart's new book, Hybrid Learning, addresses this continuum: aiming at the mid-point (actually mid range) in the degree of digital delivery continuum—the type of teaching alternatively referred to as hybrid, or blended. Perhaps counter-intuitively, says Snart, blended courses, though arriving early on the scene, as digital technologies expanded in the 1990s, were not the form that first exploded in use across the country. Rather, it was the fully online courses and programs, and entire universities, that grew first and fastest, thereby garnering the most attention (by educators and investors), and deservedly so. Significant use of hybrid courses has followed a slower developmental trajectory, continuing to grow in use across the country, with different (though related) economic, pedagogical, and technological drivers. And since this growth has occurred inside traditional courses, says Snart, the particular digital issues have often not received enough specific strategic, pedagogical, and policy-making attention, at least not nearly as much attention as fully online courses and programs have. They deserve such attention because the issues, though obviously related, are nevertheless different from those for fully online courses. Inhabiting both worlds of the virtual and the traditional, in various blends, brings additional complexities, not fewer. And since the use of hybrid courses—and institutional interests in increasing their use—continues to grow, such issues must be examined, which is the purpose of Smart's book.
I should admit at the outset that one of my reasons for reading Snart's work was born from disciplinary curiosity. As a professor of eighteenth-century British literature, and a scholar of William Blake, I'd read and admired Snart's earlier work, The Torn Book (2006), on William Blake's marginalia. In addition to wondering what wisdom on hybrid classes a fellow literature scholar would have to offer, I also wondered about the possible connection of Blake to hybrid classes: in his time, Blake had invented a new technology for powerfully blending painting and poetry into his own hybrid, aimed at effectively communicating and teaching his prophetic visions to his audience, using more than traditional methods. Would Blake, I wondered, make an appearance in a book on hybrid pedagogy?
The answer to that question will have to wait. But on a question more central to most readers of this review—whether to read Snart's book at all—the answer is a qualified yes. Though uneven, and often unable to keep inside its own taxonomies, the work does provide a decent overview of the history, policy implications, and pedagogical issues and challenges involved in hybrid teaching, along with some additional practical ideas for teaching blended courses. That list of intents alone should give some indication of the problems with the book, however. It is too ambitious in its attempt to map the field, crossing too quickly from policy-making, to providing case study examples, to offering practical advice, making the book itself a kind of hybrid. Neither fish nor fowl, neither solely an analysis of pedagogical issues nor solely a "how to" book on teaching hybrid classes, it is, ultimately, an odd read. Nevertheless, it does offer much for the many, many of us who now teach such blended courses and for the universities that administer them.
Snart himself teaches at the College of DuPage, a two year suburban community college in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. This is relevant because he draws on his experience at his home institution and also takes case studies from hybrid classes there as well, though the issues he raises throughout the book and the data he is most interested in are focused on higher education in general. He begins with some definitions of terms, explaining that he will be using the terms hybrid, blended, mixed mode, and flexible courses interchangeably. Though some institutions have tried to distinguish among them, using blended courses to mean those that meet face-to-face most of the time, and hybrid to designate those that have substantial non-face-to-face components, nevertheless, no consensus has yet emerged. Montana State University, for example, has adopted the use of the term blended rather than hybrid. We also additionally designate whether courses are web enhanced, meaning simply that they will use digital technologies but will still meet entirely face-to-face.
Snart's book is organized into seven chapters, with the framing chapters containing some autobiographical material, mostly to help capture an audience, with Snart identifying himself as a "resistant early adopter." He, thus, is someone very interested in new pedagogical opportunities, in Web 2.0, and at home with the incorporation of digital elements into the classroom. But he is also a skeptic at heart.
Chapters Two, Three, and Four, though attending to specific issues with hybrid courses, also find themselves focusing as much on online learning in general, highlighting some of the current drivers of change. Chapter Two focuses on challenges facing higher education. It could be retitled: "A Skeptic Examines Administrative Mandates." Snart reports that many institutions, including his own, have adopted goals and priorities to increase the number of hybrid courses offered, under the general (often unexamined) assumption that simply having more blended courses will help their institutions compete in the national marketplace, grow student enrollment, and also improve their numbers on key performance indicators: including student persistence rates and graduation completion rates. Often, a lack of available classroom space also lies behind the drive for more hybrids. Snart's commentary—a faculty eye view—is to remind readers that developing new hybrid courses (as does developing good fully online courses and materials) takes time, resources, and training. In short, it takes faculty support and money. Furthermore, while online courses add some flexibility in student schedules, hybrid courses, since they still necessarily require face-to-face meetings, do not necessarily add as much flexibility as institutions assume. Similarly, because hybrid courses still need classrooms, they save some classroom space, but also create scheduling nightmares. And overly hopeful assumptions can sometimes then lead to additional administrative mandates (including even specifying the amounts of hybridity in given classes to make scheduling easier), thereby allowing institutional goals to trump pedagogical design, which Snart argues should be a faculty prerogative. Finally, Snart soberly reminds readers that sometimes student desires for flexibility and convenience—an important driver of the growth in online and hybrid courses—run counter to "traditional pedagogical goals." Convenience, while important, obviously must be balanced with other academic goals, including quality.
Chapter Three continues the skeptic's commentary. While there are many sound pedagogical reasons for developing online and hybrid courses, it turns out that such courses are not a sure-fire way to improve an institution's key performance indicators, especially retention, completion, and graduation rates. Snart cites both local and national data for online courses (data for hybrid courses alone are still harder to come by, and scholars are still debating how best to get good, comparable data) that in spite of increases in flexibility for students, that "course-completion and program-retention rates are generally lower in distance-education courses than in their face-to-face counterparts" (34). This creates a dilemma (37): "How do you respond to increasing demand for online course offerings despite evidence that indicates a much lower student success rate for those who take online courses?" Snart does not proffer an answer, but he does sound a familiar warning, necessarily reissued ever since the beginning of online teaching: distance delivery is not a panacea. Done right, it is not cheap; and done cheaply, it will be of low quality. When completion rates rather than quality begin to dominate, education suffers; note, by the way, that the Montana legislature and the Board of Regents are currently at work on so-called Performance Based Funding proposals that risk exactly that. Too often, Snart feels, online learning and its hybrid sibling have been "inextricably more about the business of education than about the pedagogical integrity of learning and student success" (36). On the bright side, given the recent attention to the importance of creating a sense of academic community and "presence" in online courses (see Mary Anne Hansen's short book review in this issue, as an example), Snart believes that hybrids will continue to come into their own on this score, in part because they can maximize important elements of real and virtual presence.
Chapter Four continues this commentary on online education in general, with an interesting, yet somewhat idiosyncratic comparison of the rise of online diploma mills to the rise of for-profit correspondence schools in the United States in the 1920s. His chief warning here is for reputable institutions to be careful in their pursuit of online flexibility, so as not to begin to look too much like the diploma mills that they often criticize. It is important to maintain mechanisms of quality control, including a highly trained faculty and robust accrediting bodies. In an era when drives for efficiency are leading some institutions to outsource curriculum development and course design, and even grading, and to increasingly use contingent faculty to "deliver" or "manage" courses, rather than teach them, Snart sees connections to abuses during the correspondence school era. Similarly, to avoid using such courses as a cash source, often from students who can least afford it, Snart calls for the enforcement of admission standards, of effective "gatekeeping efforts on the part of institutions, public and for-profits alike…to ensure that only those students who are legitimately likely to succeed are allowed to enroll" (68).
Chapter Five finally turns from issues to examples, from problems with the economics of online learning in general to examples of specific hybrid classes, mostly at Snart's home institution. While a relief in some respects, since the book's focus finally narrows to the minute particulars of actual hybrid classes, the purpose of this section is less to offer specific examples of how hybrid teaching might be accomplished, or even best practices, than it is to illustrate that it can be done well, with satisfied students and teachers. The examples are not really selected to demonstrate a broad range of hybrid course types, nor are they detailed enough to function as a guide or source of ideas for hybrid teaching. They do, however, illustrate some of the parameters and methods for blended courses, from using out-of-class time for quizzes, and in-class time for lectures and other types of interaction. The case studies, however, seem too general and even dated, not addressing, for example, the lively national debates going on about the "flipped" classroom, advocated by our own national award winning Bozeman High School teacher Paul Andersen, nor TEAL classrooms (Technology Enhanced Active Learning classrooms), such as MSU has recently been building.
Chapter Six continues with an obvious interest of Snart, in pedagogical opportunities made available through online interaction and even social media. Some of the elements described have long been ensconced in classrooms of all types (online or otherwise), from the use of course management systems such as Blackboard (MSU moved from using WebCT to D2L several years ago) to the use of shared student blogs to using Wikis to aid in writing cooperatively. Snart also addresses some less familiar and even untapped possibilities for aiding digital pedagogies, including social bookmarking—turning the private activities of personal webpage bookmarking into a social activity; MMOGs—massively multiplayer online games, such as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean; and MMORPGs—massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The latter is of particular interest to Snart. He gives detailed attention to the pedagogical possibilities of one particular example, Second Life: the 3-D immersive online world, citing examples of students using it to send their avatars to remote places for educational exploration, such as Tintern Abbey in Wales. Unfortunately, the recent surge in interest and development of MOOCs—massive open online courses—is too new a phenomena to receive attention in the book, and probably beyond the scope of the book anyway, since they have no hybrid aspects.
Overall, then, Snart's modest book is an interesting read. The subject, by its nature, is itself massive, with crossover elements into pedagogy in general, online delivery, face-to-face teaching, and the complexities of combining them. More encyclopedic works will follow, as will more collections of essays on specific aspects of teaching hybrids. The value of this book, however, lies in its succinct attempt to map the field, to highlight issues, and to continue to sound the skeptic's note, from the point of view of a passionate practitioner. While not the only important voice, it is a position we need to continue to hear from as educational policy, educational technology, and hopefully the educated imagination continues to develop and thrive in this country.
Oh, and I almost forgot: William Blake, alas, does not make an appearance in the book.
[The Montana Professor 23.2, Spring 2013 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]