Blended Courses

Procedures and Definitions

1. Blended course sections are to be placed in one of seven categories: OL10, OL25, OL33, OL50, OL67, OL75, and OL90. In each case the number is the approximate percentage of meeting time replaced by out-of-class activities. These are usually asynchronous online activities, but in some cases could be independent field or group work, as long as such work is not scheduled time in the presence of the instructor. We’ll refer to these activities as “online” for short in the rest of the page. These categories will be entered as codes in the attribute field for the section.
2. A written plan must be submitted to the department chair for any course section to be scheduled as blended, giving the planned schedule of face-to-face meetings and describing the online activities. Changes or exceptions are allowed for canceling a F2F meeting due to unforeseen circumstances, but not for scheduling additional F2F meetings after registration begins.
3. Using the information provided in 2), the course must either show F2F meeting times in Banner via room scheduling or provide the schedule of F2F meetings in the SSATEXT or Section Text field. This information must be available to students at the time of registration. If the course has one day that is a designated for online (i.e. Monday, Wednesday, Friday class, meets online every Friday) then there will also need to be a second line added under Meeting Times and the Building set as Web for that line.
4. The comments entered in the SSATEXT (or Comments) field should reflect the specific dates, either when the class meets or does not meets, whichever is shorter. 
5. For international students who are required to take a certain minimum number of face-to-face courses, blended courses in categories OL10,OL25, OL33, and OL50 will be considered face-to-face, while those in the other categories will be considered online.
6. For information on SACM restraints, please contact the International Office at x6863
7. If you would like to check out the PowerPoint used for the blended courses training workshop, click here.

To sum up, it's all about time spent in face-to-face classroom meetings.  A standard face-to-face lecture course meets for 750 minutes per credit hour -- for instance, one 50-minute meeting per week for 15 weeks.  A blended course is one that meets face-to-face for fewer than 750 minutes per credit hour and REPLACES that face-to-face meeting time with online activities or some other activities that don’t require the student to be present at a particular set time..  A course that meets 750 minutes per credit hour and also requires some online “homework” activities is NOT blended.

It is also about letting the students know what to expect so they can plan their semester time accordingly.

Calculating the Percentage

• For a F2F lecture class, 750 minutes of instruction constitute one credit hour. For a three-credit class, 2250 minutes are required.
• To determine the percentage of blending, count the number of minutes in face-to-face meetings:
  • For a three-credit class that meets Monday and Wednesday for 50 minutes each, this would be 2 times a week x 50 minutes x 15 weeks = 1500 minutes F2F.
  • Then subtract from the F2F minute requirement
  • For a three-credit class, this is 750 minutes per credit x 3 credits = 2250 minutes. 2250 minutes total – 1500 minutes F2F = 750 minutes online.
  • Then divide the online minutes by the total minutes and multiply by 100 to get a percentage:
  • 750 minutes online / 2250 minutes F2F x 100 = 33
• So this course would be OL33. If the percentage is not exactly one of the categories listed, choose the closest one, so if it’s 40 percent, use OL33; if it’s 45 percent, use OL50. Exceptions are at the extremes; if even a small amount F2F time is replaced with online work, but it’s less than 10%, use OL10. If more than 90% of the course is online, but there is at least one F2F meeting, use OL90.
• If math is not quite your thing, the wonderful folks over at IT have made a useful calculator for calculating the blended categories. You can find that calculator on their Website. To use the calculator for a course that has regular meetings, select how many times a week they will meet, the number of credit hours of the course, how long each meeting will be, the number of weeks in the semester, and click calculate. The blended code will appear at the bottom of the page. If the course has irregular meetings, select the number of weeks in the semester, input the F2F time for each week, enter the number of credit hours of the course and click calculate. Just like the regular calculator, the blended code will appear at the bottom of the page.

 

 Resources

• Blended Courses Calculator
• Blended Courses Training Presentation Slides
• Blended Courses Interactive Training Website