Hybrid Courses Advantages

Hybrid courses offer advantages over face-to-face teaching or totally online courses, such as:

• Convenience: coursework accommodates students’ schedules, plus commuting time is decreased.
  Interaction: Hybrid instructors report increased interaction and contact among students and between the instructor and the students.
• Flexibility: instructors can accomplish certain learning objectives more successfully than in traditional courses because of the flexibility of the Hybrid model. Rachel Spilka explains this point in her article, "Approximately "Real World" Learning with the Hybrid Model," Teaching With Technology Today, March 20, 2002.
• Increased learning: faculty almost universally report their students learn more in the Hybrid format than they do in traditional class sections. Instructors report that students write better papers, perform better on exams, produce higher quality projects, and are capable of more meaningful discussions on course material.

Qualitative assessments of better student learning are supported by quantitative data from the University of Central Florida (UCF). UCF reports that students in Hybrid courses achieve slightly better grades than students in traditional face-to-face courses or totally online courses. See “Recent Presentations” at EDUCAUSE NLII 2001, "The Payoff for Systemic Evaluation of University-Wide Distributed Learning", slide 6 http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~rite/

• Increased retention: data from the University of Central Florida (UCF) also show that student retention in Hybrid courses is better than retention in totally online courses and equivalent to that of face-to-face courses.

For more about University of Central Florida's research into distributed instructional models see their Distance Learning Impact Evaluation.