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Welcome to this overview of the gears diagram assignment in the CWI Hybrid Instruction Course.
One of the biggest challenges students face with hybrid courses is the different
workflow involved with changing back and forth between multiple modes of instruction and
assessment. This assignment will help you begin creating materials to support your
students as they learn how to learn in a hybrid environment.
This gears diagram is a graphic organizer to help students visualize the different
components of the course and the importance of each one, so they can better prioritize their
work and ensure that they are allowing adequate time for the various requirements throughout
the semester. You are encouraged to include this as part of the support materials
you provide to students in your syllabus, in Blackboard, or as a handout in class.
You will need to make adjustments to this sheet in
order to match the components of your course,
but most hybrid courses will utilize Blackboard, on campus sessions, and some additional
source of instruction or information, such as a textbook or third party platform such as
Pearson’s MyLabs. Talk to the facilitator of this course if you want to propose a different
kind of graphic organizer to summarize this information for your class.
In order to fill out this sheet, you should label each gear; list
the different kinds of activities, assignments, and assessments that correspond
to each component; and give an estimate of the number of points contained in each.
Alternatively, if the point values are not very representative of the relative
importance of each component, you could list the number of hours that students should be spending on them each week.
At this point, you will likely just be using rough estimates based on how you
envision your hybrid course developing and you’ll have to revisit it when you are further
along in the development process to make revisions and fine-tune it. We introduce it
early on so that you can start thinking right away about the separate requirements of a
hybrid course and how they will work together.
Here is an example of a completed gears diagram for a hybrid Spanish course, which
uses Blackboard and MySpanishLab in addition to the weekly class meetings. You can
see that here the point breakdown offers a clear demonstration of the importance of each component.
Again, the purpose of this assignment is to assist your students in understanding the
organization and requirements of your hybrid course, so if you feel that a different
layout would better serve that purpose for your particular course, you can work with the facilitator to make that change.