English 895: Blog 1

For my first blog post, I chose an article from one of our classmates that happened to be the first thing that popped up when I was searching for material related to teaching hybrid courses:

Spiegel, Cheri Lemieux. "Representing Clarity: Using Universal Design Principles to Create

       Effective Hybrid Course Learning Materials. " Teaching English in the Two Year College   
       39.3 (2012): 247-255. ProQuest. Web.  17 May. 2012.

In “Representing Clarity: Using Universal Design Principles to Create Effective Hybrid Course Learning Materials,” Cheri Lemieux Spiegel draws on James Sosnoski’s work to argue that some students use “hyper-reading” techniques when reading online course materials, which can lead them to miss important information about assignments and thus cause them to be less successful in the course.  Then, using Lidwell, Holden, and Butler’s Universal Principles of Design, Spiegel delineates how she used selected design concepts to redesign her hybrid course materials to accommodate her students’ hyper-reading tendencies and promote greater student success in the course.

Spiegel begins by explaining her early experiences with hybrid education and how she noticed that her hybrid students were having problems locating assignments and instructions on Blackboard, which in turn caused her overall student success rate in her hybrid course to be much lower than in her regular face-to-face class.  To figure out why her hybrid students were having so many problems, she reviews James Sosnoski’s work on “hyper-readers” who are more likely to filter, skim, peck, and otherwise read online text in a more cursory way than traditional reading.  Based on the types of questions she had received from her students through email, Spiegel believes that many of her hybrid students’ problems result from these hyper-reading techniques.  So she decides to acknowledge this and use it to her advantage in presenting her course materials in a way more conducive to this type of reading.  Spiegel then draws on Lidwell, Holden, and Butler’s Universal Principles of Design, from which she chooses three main principles of design to aid her in redesigning her hybrid course material on Blackboard: consistency, color, and icon representation.  Spiegel explains in detail how she uses each of these three characteristics to redesign her online course materials and includes discussion of making the content consistent, choosing appropriate colors, and creating icons to visually direct students’ attention.  After implementing these principles in her new design, she found that her student success rate significantly improved.

I would definitely recommend Spiegel’s article to both online and hybrid instructors who are new to online learning or who are having similar problems with their students.  Spiegel draws on relevant theories about “hyper-reading” in an attempt to identify the obstacles to her students’ success, and then selects other useful theories about design to describe her approach to rectifying these obstacles through better visual design—an aspect of online course design that I’m sure many of us have too often overlooked, especially in a platform like Blackboard, which many of us are forced to use whether we like it or not.  This article is clear, easy to understand, and useful for aiding online instructors in any discipline to better understand and create clear and effective online course materials.