The pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of life, including how we teach our courses. We’re presenting courses in varying modes of instruction ranging from socially distanced face-to-face to many forms of hybrid to fully online. Let us peek inside one of the hybrid courses, Dr. Beyerl’s Linear Algebra course.
In this course, Dr. Beyerl teaches a hybrid delivery with half of the course synchronous and half of the course asynchronous.
In the synchronous setting students can either come to a socially distanced face-to-face class, or an online setting. The two options were at different times meaning Dr. Beyerl gave the same lecture multiple times. He recorded the online session for students that could not make the lecture that week.
In the asynchronous setting students read from the textbook and watched videos, then solved problems and discussed what they learned on a weekly discussion board. For consistency, each week had identical due dates: everything would open each Saturday morning and be due 9 days later on Sunday night. Dr. Beyerl remarks that he chose 9 days so that each weekend students would be able to choose to catch up from the previous week or get ahead for the next week.
Today, Dr. Beyerl reflects on the videos he created realizes how he’s grown through this new experience. The videos in November were definitely higher quality than those in August.