Design and development of a hybrid instruction model for a new teaching paradigm

In recent years, many universities have sought to develop distance learning courses and programs that are delivered through the Web. The promising results achieved by many of these projects lead to a question: how can we integrate the best features of Web-based learning into a conventional classroom-based model of instruction? To answer this question, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Languages and Linguistics at Florida Atlantic University, USA, are jointly working on a pilot project that integrates conventional classroom teaching and Web-based distance learning technologies to form a hybrid instruction model for a teaching paradigm that can be easily applied toward learner-centered education. This paper explains the motivation for this project and describes its main technical aspects. A number of the pedagogical and practical issues related to the proposed model are reviewed and the results obtained in its first trial are discussed. Conclusions drawn from a student exit survey and from classroom experience are presented at the end of the article with recommendations for future implementations of a hybrid instructional model.