This semester I offered my first U.S. elective as a hybrid. The course, America Meets the Modern, 1920-1945, met once a week for an hour and fifteen minutes, with the other “half” online.

Eschewing Blackboard, I had the class meet online in a wordpress blog. Each week, students produced one of two types of posts: a reading reflection or a movie analysis. They blogged about a supplementary reading, which tended to be lenghtier essays, evaluating the arguments and making connections to the documents discussed in class that week. For the movie analysis posts, they watched a feature-length film and analyzed it as a product of its moment. Films included several famous Chaplin productions, The Golddiggers, It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Casablanca. I also assigned supplemental readings regarding the Hays code and some readings about film and depression-era culture.

Grading for the blog posts was by participation, but every four posts I would write a summary post elaborating on what students did well and what they were missing, with the idea that these reflections would be applied to their formal writing projects, which were a formal movie analysis paper and a final research paper based on a series of digital archives, a thematic exploration of the course, or a project to add to the Living New Deal (no one chose the last option, sadly).

For this course, what made it successful was the size. Had I had a group of twenty-five, it would have forced me to use a rubric to grade the blog posts, and would have made the individualized sessions on their research papers more complicated to schedule and perform.

So the question remains, is hybrid teaching in electives worth it?

• A hybrid course made me feel freer to assign films as additional course materials. I assigned films that could be rented through Amazon or other sources.
• The weekly writing assigned online provided a low-stakes environment to focus on mechanical issues and analytical skills.
• Students were able to have a true seminar-style experience — while this was more a matter of circumstance than design, I think the hybrid format lends itself to more active learning in the classroom.

• Less time for historiography. Because I focused on primary sources and analytical essays in class, I found I had less time to go into the historiography of the New Deal or the welfare/warfare state.
• That feeling that I’m missing some key points. Having them in front of you more often provides more opportunities to explore the course themes, to reflect, and to have students engage more in small groups with readings and arguments. I often felt rushed to get to the big points of a topic and felt that some of the nuance of topics (the discussions of nativism and welfare capitalism in the 1920s, as well as the in-class discussions about Depression culture, got particular short shrift). Perhaps if I recorded lectures this would be less of an issue for future offerings.
• The online environment. Don’t get me started on Blackboard. And while I like giving students the opportunity to learn a new web-based skill like WordPress blogging, finding just the right tools still eludes me.