Blog Post 1

Blog Post 1

http://edudemic.com/2012/05/6-pros-and-cons-of-a-hybrid-education/#comment-17292

Copied from website that “sparked my interest”:

Cons to a hybrid education:

1.   Doing the majority of your coursework at home may be convenient, but if all your classes are hybrid or online learning courses you will miss out on the fun of being on campus on a regular basis. As much as college is about education, it is also about the college experience – making new friends, taking on new extracurricular activities, enjoying dorm life, etc. Someone who chooses a hybrid education may not be able to do as many of these things as a full-time, brick-and-mortar student would and could lose out on the chance to meet their life-long friends in a college setting.
2. Another criticism of online lectures that are used in conjunction with hybrid education is that you lose some of the personal interaction of the traditional classroom setting. For instance, there’s no friend sitting next to you for asking questions or making comments during a lecture. While Tweeting is an option for this kind of banter in a hybrid education setting, some students find it distracting to be Tweeting and reading Tweets, as well as checking out links that the professor tweets and discusses, all while trying to focus on the lesson at hand.
3. Hybrid classes are typically more expensive than traditional online learning classes. If you’re pursuing an online education and decide to take a few hybrid classes as part of that, be sure to first find out how much it will cost. In other words, do your homework before you start your class. Don’t assume that just because you’ll be going to school online, your hybrid classes will cost the same as your traditional online classes.— This is interesting to me because I believe that if done correctly, many of these cons could be changed to a pro and by using all the available websites and technology a “classroom community” can be achieved.

Blog Response:

I recently took my first hybrid course, which was not how you described it. I think it is true that there are many variations to what is considered “hybrid.” With the technology age, hybrid courses, at least in my own experience, give you the face to face contact briefly throughout the semester as well as giving you time as a student to learn how to work collaboratively and learn independently using the internet. It helps the student become more familiar and confident in using different forms of learning for when they enter the workforce and are required to interact using various forms of communication. I see many pros to hybrid courses and very very few cons.