Hybrid Courses Make Sense For Students Who Are At Different Levels In the Same Classroom

05Dec
by Matthew Meadors

One of the major issues with the traditional classrooms is the difference in learning speeds and techniques. One student may understand a topic after skimming through a brief reading while another may not understand it until laboring through hundreds of practice problems. 

How do you properly assist both? If you take the time to make sure the latter student understands the material, you’ve neglected the former who certainly had time to learn something more advanced. With class sizes increasing and the number of teachers not quite keeping up, how could anyone really hope to respond? 

This is where the beauty of the modern era comes into play, with an all online class, the teacher can now take a step back from the lead roll in the classroom. Now that is not to say that the teacher is now a bystander by any means, but it does mean that they have the ability to properly administer aid and attention. With an electronic curriculum, the student who has an excellent grasp on the material can breeze through the work and move on, while the student who needs just a little extra help can have the full attention and time for the teacher to work at their pace until the material is well grasped. 

When I attended USC Hybrid High School, there were many students with different ways of learning and retaining information. The best example I can think of is my anatomy class, which I had the advantage of finding incredibly interesting. This led me to put in a lot of research time outside of the class purely out of entertainment, and led me to be quite a ways ahead of my peers in my own understanding of the material. That is one student in a class of 20+ who no longer needs the steady presence of the instructor at all to complete their work, in a normal setting I simply would have had to slow myself down and stay with the class. Because of Ednovate’s hybrid learning class curriculum, I was able to push forward as far as my understanding allowed me to go until I didn’t know something. Then I would simply start researching or actually ask my teacher for a little bit of help. This allowed me to fully explore my interest in human anatomy and get quite a bit of extra information that I use quite often when navigating my close friends’ and my own health.

Not only does this allow for a student to learn at their own pace, which is certain to improve their personal performance, but they can also get instant feedback. With the answers already preset before they begin the assignment, a student can instantly be made aware of what they need to study a little harder to remember. This not only helps the student, but the teaching staff as well. With large class sizes the turn around date on a large turn in could be several days, several long nights for the teacher, or a miserable combination of the two. 

A lot of people may think that we’ve gone too far by attempting to incorporate the use of technology into our educational system, and I have a point that I hope those people may find very interesting. How do you think I’m drafting this post? How are you viewing this post? What are millions of Americans using everyday in their workplace? 

Technology is the future, for better or for worse, and it is the job of an education system to prepare its students for the future. I believe that by integrating and gradually shifting to the online learning curriculum, we are giving our students the best help we can provide, and I certainly don’t see a problem with that.

What do you think?
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Matthew Meadors

Matthew Meadors

Matthew Meadors is a second year psychology major at Cal Poly Pomona. He attended Westchester Secondary Charter School for his freshman through junior years of high school. He then went on to attend USC Hybrid High School for his senior year. Matthew’s father made sure he found quality public schools for his children, and it resulted in them attending charter schools since kindergarten.

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