Death—Planning for the Inevitable: A Hybrid Honors Course

One of the National Collegiate Honors Council's Basic Characteristics of an Honors Program is that "the program serves as a laboratory within which faculty feel welcome to experiment with new subjects, approaches, and pedagogies. When proven successful, such efforts in curriculum and pedagogical development can serve as prototypes for initiatives that can become institutionalized across the campus." Four faculty members from the departments of nursing and respiratory therapy at Midwestern State University, a public liberal arts university in Wichita Falls, designed and taught a hybrid honors course called Death--Planning for the Inevitable. This course, which combined traditional in-class and online instruction, might pave the way for determining how honors education can evolve to accommodate the needs of not just honors students but the wider campus context and beyond. Death--Planning for the Inevitable (from here on called simply Death) was a three-credit-hour, semester-long course that met for two hours each week in a traditional classroom setting, with the other hour spent on an online component using Blackboard, the university's program for distance education. The MSU College of Health Sciences and Human Services has an extensive program of online coursework and confers degrees on a number of students who rarely, if ever, set foot on campus. Each of the instructors has experience in teaching online courses, and one of the four instructors had previous experience teaching honors classes. This combination of experiences made it reasonable to investigate the direction of online honors instruction. The following study presents background on the merits of online education in honors, including hybrid courses, followed by an exploration of the perceptions of honors students and faculty who participated in the honors hybrid course. We believe this method of teaching successfully enhanced the honors experience and that the hybrid method may be useful in other honors programs as well. THE GROWTH OF ONLINE EDUCATION Traditionally, one assumes that learning is to take place in a classroom or other face-to-face environment where the instructor and students are physically together. However, not all students learn the same way; therefore, the traditional approach is not ideal for all students (Young). The use of the Internet and network technologies to provide a means of communication to learners, regardless of their location, challenges the view that learning requires a face-to-face environment (Stacey, Smith, & Barty). Advances in technology expand the range of educational possibilities and contribute to an increased interest in online education; this results in a growing number of courses being supplemented or completely delivered through distance education (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer). Allen, Seaman, and Garrett reported in a major 2004 study of more than 2,500 colleges and universities in the United States, that 55% of public higher education institutions offered at least one online or hybrid course. That percentage is likely to have increased dramatically over the past seven years and will continue to rise as technology advances. Honors programs and colleges should explore these methods of teaching in order to remain relevant in a connected world. One factor that contributes to the widespread growth of online education is the potential to facilitate learning. online learning may enable constructivist learning strategies such as self-directed, collaborative, and active learning. Gonzales and Sujo de Montes concluded that key themes of online learning include collaboration, student-centered learning, exploration, shared knowledge, community, and authenticity. These types of learning strategies may occur by allowing students increased time and flexibility for student-to-student interaction, as well as student-to-teacher interaction, by expanding the range of resources available. Students also have increased responsibility for their own learning, and an online component allows for the production of an individualized environment to suit students' different needs and learning styles (Ayala; Garrison; Jonassen et al. …