USING HYBRID TECHNIQUES IN A FACE-TO-FACE COURSE: AN EXPERIMENT IN FLIPPING THE CLASSROOM

A hybrid (or blended) course at Dalton State College, GA consists of online material (chapter notes, quizzes, study guides, internet links, etc.), one lecture and one lab per week. The regular face-to-face course has two lectures and a lab per week. Using the online material for an introductory physical geology course, a face-to-face course was revised. One of the weekly lecture meetings was conducted exactly the way the hybrid course was taught. This included a clicker quiz to test whether students had prepared using the online notes, a short lecture on the most difficult topics for the chapter under discussion, and a question and review period. This left one of the weekly lecture periods free to engage in interactive/group activities designed to highlight concepts of each chapter. Some of these activities and their outcomes will be discussed. The results show that the students in the flipped face-to-face course did modestly better than the students in the hybrid course on certain assessed measures, but not overall. This may be due to self-selection between students who register for hybrid courses versus those who register for regular courses. Improvements for the future of the flipped classroom include changing the use of clicker quizzes and assessment of student activities.