The Best of Both Worlds

Not the Hannah Montana song. This is "hybrid" or "blended" classes -- those that are taught using both online and in-class instruction to teach. There's some anecdotal evidence from a University of Houston professor that students learn better with the hybrid format than with in-class learning alone.

Brian McFarlin, a professor at the University of Houston’s Laboratory of Integrated Physiology, decided to conduct an experiment in one of his classes to observe the strengths and weaknesses of hybrid courses. The project was partly funded by a faculty development grant from the university’s office of educational technology.

McFarlin found that final student grades were 9.9 percent higher (an increase of one letter grade on a standard grading scale) when the course was administered in a hybrid format.

A total of 658 final grades were used to evaluate the effect of the course-delivery format on academic performance. All exams used the same question bank for each course format.

“When I started, I just wanted to make sure that students did as well in the hybrid version of the class as the traditional. I quickly learned that technology is powerful when used properly,” said McFarlin.

Though the sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions, it raises some interesting questions to explore more fully.