Evolving roles of online and face-to-face instructors in a lecture/lab hybrid course

Although lecture and lab courses are commonly used in higher education, there are potential problems with this format. However, technology is presenting new opportunities for teaching such a type of a course. This study explores the changes in the role of the instructors when a lecture and lab course evolved into a hybrid course, with the lecture portion of a course online and the labs kept face-to-face. As revealed through the use of discourse analysis, the roles of the instructors were transformed from teacher-centered to student-centered, low-interactor to high-interactor, and low-initiator to high-initiator. There was also an obvious merging or synthesis of the roles of the lecture and lab instructors, particularly in the areas of course administration, subject matter expertise, and face of the course.