Blended Course Proposal Gill 1

Blended Course Proposal

Jon Gill

Oklahoma State University EDTC 5503

Blended Course Proposal Gill 2

It is past time to switch up the traditional social studies classroom that relies too much on

lecture and bores the students. No I am not saying that lecture should be taken out of the

course or that is it a bad method of teaching but I think that it should be scaled back. Another

problem of traditional social studies classroom is that students also think that the class does not

apply to what they will do in life. I want to allow the students to develop more skills that will be

helpful to them through a social studies class. By switching to a hybrid course the students will

be more active and have the chance to learn about what they want to learn about rather than

being passive learners only hearing about what the teacher tells them. I want to redesign a

traditional U.S. History course that sophomores and juniors take in high schools. This project

would cover a unit that I would teach in the U.S. History course that goes over the progressive

era. I chose this unit because it is one that the students usually struggle with and might not find

the most interesting. I hope that by starting with this unit, the students and faculty would see the

possibilities of a blended course compared to the traditional course.

Although it is not a new course it is a course that I have not taught before for a full year

so I will be starting from scratch. The course would not be a fully online course but a blended or

hybrid course that balances face-to-face interaction with online work. I think that blended is the

way to go because it still allows for the face-to-face interaction of a traditional course but allows

more time for student interaction and projects. The course objectives would not change as it

would still have to meet all of the standards that other high school social studies classes meet. I

am going to have to arrange the classroom activities so that the students are benefitting from

both the time face-to-face and the online setting. I plan to have most of the material still in a

face-to-face setting but use the online setting for about a third of the course. It is important for

the students to stop being passive learners in social studies courses and start doing history.

Although it might take a while, the student engagement of the course will increase and when the

students are doing projects that they are interested in then they are more likely to remember the

information (Saritepeci and Cakir, 2015). I know that this will not be an easy transition for the
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students or the faculty creating the course, but I believe that it will be advantageous to all parties

in the long run.

This course should be taught as a blended course for a myriad of reasons including the

fact that most students do not like the traditional history course. If most students go into the

course thinking that it is going to be boring and then you sit up in front of the class and lecture

the whole time, then they are going to ignore you and not get much out of the class. History is

such an exciting topic if the students gave it a chance and I think that the students would be

more positive towards history if they were more active in the course. A blended course also

allows the students to explore topics that are more interested in learning about and might apply

more to their life. If the class is taught in a blended fashion, then the students would have more

class time to do more interactive things rather than the teacher having to focus on making sure

all of the content is covered. Simple things such as taking weekly quizzes online or having brief

introduction to topics online rather than in class can end up saving huge amounts of time.

Although it was in a different subject, Shibley, Amaral, Shank, and Shibley did a study that took

a traditional chemistry course and changed it to a blended course with terrific results. Not only

did the students GPA significantly rise in the blended course but the ratio of students who

passed the course to failing the course also rose (Shibley,... 2011). While this is a small sample,

it shows the impact that a blended course can have on the students and the level of learning.

Some other reasons that blended learning will be good for this course is that it reaches

more students various learning styles and it helps the teacher in the long run. By doing the

course in a blended fashion, it has a better chance to appeal to all of the students’ learning

styles. It still allows for the people who like face-to-face interaction communicate with the

teacher and ask the questions that they need to ask. Then for students who are shy in face-to-

face settings or take longer to process concepts, they would benefit probably benefit from the

online section where they could communicate through the discussion boards. Our goal as a

teacher is to help all of the students learn or as many as we can and I believe that the teaching
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the course in the blended fashion is the best way to accomplish that. It will also benefit the

teacher with grading and having the information all in one spot. The students will be doing

quizzes online and some discussion posts so they will be easier to grade and put in the

gradebook. It also makes it easy to connect with the parents and allow them to follow along with

what the students are learning in class. The teacher might be overwhelmed at first because it is

a lot of work at the beginning but it makes it easier when it is established and designed. While

the blended course has any positives, it is not a perfect answer and takes a little while to

balance how much work to do in each portion of the class. Although it might be a struggle for

the teacher and the students at the beginning, they will both realize they positive effects at the

end.

For this course, I will use the learning management system of Schoology for the online

portion. I will use Schoology because it is something that the students are most likely going to

already be familiar with. Most classes at the school have started to transition to using Schoology

because of the capabilities they have so it just makes sense to use something the teacher, the

students, and the parents have used before. I will still make sure that the students still go

through a tutorial and have time to play with the site so that they are comfortable with all of the

parts that we might use. Schoology is a good way to host online parts of a course and it is easy

for the teacher to add information and keep it all in one place. Schoology even has a similar look

to social media that the students use like Facebook so that it is easy to navigate. Using

Schoology makes it easy to communicate with the parents because teachers can let the parents

create accounts to look at what their kids are learning and their grades. This is important for that

age because communication with the parents is so critical to the student success.

The students that are taking this course are going to be high school sophomores and

juniors. I might have four sections of the class with about 25 students in each section. I would

want to teach this course for the regular U.S. History classes or possibly even AP. They will

most likely come into the course with little knowledge of American History. They will have taken
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U.S. History up to the end of the Civil War in middle school and they will have some prior

knowledge based on what they heard from their parents and their friends. The students have

some knowledge of technology but probably have not used it much for educational purposes.

The students will have access to the LMS online which will provide students with some

assignments and quizzes. I will also post all of the lecture slides online but only after I make

sure that the students know how to take notes. I plan that the students will have access to a

computer lab before and after school while I will also open my room up to let the students work

on their assignments. The students will be able to access the information from their personal

laptops and devices as well at the school through the school’s Wi-Fi. The students will have

access to work on the assignments when they are at home as well. I think that most of the

students will have internet access at home but I know that will not be the case for all of my

students. The students usually come into a social studies classroom thinking that a teacher is

going to lecture at them the whole hour so they will probably be excited for something different.

For the purposes of this proposal, I will only be sharing the goals for the unit that I am

focusing on, the Progressive Era. Some overarching goals that they will be working on in this

course that apply to this unit are, the student will be able to analyze and evaluate primary

source documents. The students will be able to think historically which includes placing the

article into context and stating the cause of the article. The students will be able to conduct

research and evaluate the credibility of the sources that they use. The students will be able to

identify what a muckraker is and some of the issues that they were revealing to the public. The

students will assess the role of media on public opinion including the muckrakers and yellow

journalism. The students will be able to identify some of the muckrakers such as Jacob Riis and

Ida Tarbell. The students will be able to evaluate why this era is known as the progressive era

and whether or not it was really progressive. The students will be able to discuss the various

progressive era reforms such as women’s suffrage and the child labor movement. The students

will also look at other movements during this time such as the thoughts of Marcus Garvey,
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Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. DuBois. The student will be able to assess the role of labor

unions during this era and their impact on the progressive era. The students will be able to

identify the constitutional amendments during the progressive era (16th-21st amendments) and

the process of making an amendment to the constitution.

Some of the activities that I intend to include in my class are lecture, class discussions,

student research, role playing, online debate, quizzes, and using Storyboard That. I plan for the

students to do a little outside reading and I plan on posting outlines for the class lectures. I hope

that by doing this they will look at the outline and then ask questions they have on the material

or that we can go deeper into the information. When we can go deeper into the information and

concepts is usually when good classroom discussion can occur. I will try to mix it into face-to-

face time at first but then transition some of it to the online format. I plan to have at least two

online discussions per unit that we do in class. In this unit over the progressive era, I will have

the students do a role play that is synchronous. The students will be in pairs and they will be

required to do research over a progressive era reformer that they select. The students will then

use the research gathered to make an argument for why their issue was the most important to

the U.S. to the moderator who is the teacher. I will conduct online quizzes through the LMS that

I created. I plan to have one quiz per week that the students can take in their free time. Lastly, I

will use the online site Storyboard That and have the students use their creativity to create a

historical storyboard. One that has been successful in the past for me is to create a storyboard

for what happened to the U.S.S. Maine. We will learn about yellow journalism during this time

period so it is the student's job to come up with their own version of what happened in the

Havana Harbor to the U.S.S. Maine in order to sell their newspaper. These activities are

designed so that the students are more active and engaged in the class.

Although I am proposing a blended course, I do not think that I would have more that

33% of the course online. Since it will be in a k-12 setting, I expect that they are going to be in

class more than being online. Since the school has the technology of one-to-one, I can give
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them some time in class to do the online assignments. Figuring out the balance between how

much work to do in each and which activities fall better in each is one of the hardest parts of

designing a blended course. The problem that I will run into is that I might assign too much to

the students and they will not be able to keep up with the workload. I think that it is going to take

a few years to find that right balance but when it is done correctly the course will benefit both the

students and the instructor.

I plan on incorporating some forms of social media and other technology tools in this

class but not sure exactly which those would be. I think that it is important to use the social

media sites that the students are on because it can make the class more interesting or engaging

for the students. I think that it would be interesting to incorporate something like Snapchat into

the course because that is what all of the students are on right now. The only problem with

using Snapchat is that it can be risky since the messages disappear. Maybe I could create a

class Snapchat account and post reminders for the students and possibly let them run it one

day of the week. I think that it could create more student engagement in the class and allow

them to have some fun with the class. I plan to take advantage of some of the wonderful free

tech tools that are out there such as Nearpod, Padlet, and Remind. I like to use Nearpod at the

beginning of class as a warm up or bell ringer for the students. The students seem to really like

this tool and their favorite part was when I gave them drawing questions. Padlet is another free

tool that is nice to use exit activities and as basically a poster board for ideas. Remind will be

helpful as I know many of the students will forget about the assignments that I give them so if I

send them messages on remind they do not have as many excuses or reasons why they did not

do the work.

I believe that since the course is going to be taught in a blended method that it will help

some of communication barriers of a fully online course. In the first few weeks of the class I will

make sure there are a good amount of group work assignments where they work in different

groups so that they get to know everyone in the class. I think that building this familiarity early in
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the class will help with building that community face-to-face and in the online setting. I will

probably do the first online discussion in class so that the students know what to expect and so I

can answer any questions that they have. I would require the students to respond to each other

so that they become more comfortable posting online.

There will be various methods that I will use to assess the students and their academic

progress. For the projects that I have them do, I will post rubrics on the LMS so that the

students know what to expect. I will most likely have quizzes that the students will take at the

beginning of the unit and at least one other point of the unit before their summative assessment

of the unit. I will give the students a pre-assessment at the start of the unit to gauge where the

students are at with the information. The exit assignments in class will go a long way in

determining what the students are understanding and what they are struggling with. I will have

bell ringers at the beginning of class so that it tests whether or not the students are

understanding the objectives. I will use assignments such as the role playing activity and the

storyboard to see the students use the skills such as researching, putting things into context,

and thinking historically. The final summative assessment of the unit will be a choice of an

essay, a test, or a project that displays what they have learned over the unit and skills that they

are developing.

While teaching the U.S. History course in the blended/hybrid setting will not be easy and

the results might not be obvious at first, it will benefit both the teacher and the students in the

long run. The hybrid setting allows for the students to be more active participants in social

studies classes rather than passive learners. The students will also benefit from the various

teaching styles that will be shown from the blend of face-to-face teaching and the online setting.

Parents will also like the blended course because it allows for easier communication to the

teacher, their student’s grades, and what is going on in the class. A blended course is the best

of both worlds because it develops the social skills and relationships of a face-to-face class

while also incorporating the benefits of the advancing technology heavy world.
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References

Saritepeci, M., & Cakir, H. (2015). The effect of blended learning environments on student motivation and

student engagement: A study on social studies course. Egitim ve Bilim, 40(177).

Shibley, I., Amaral, K. E., Shank, J. D., & Shibley, L. R. (2011). Designing a blended course: Using

ADDIE to guide instructional design. Journal of College Science Teaching, 40(6), 80-85.