Hybrid Courses and Their Impact on Student and Classroom Performance: A Case Study at the University of Virginia

The University of Virginia's (UVA) Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese created two new hybrid courses for elementary Spanish which supplement 3 hours a week of class time with 2 hours of mandatory, web-based practice activities to respond to a need to make better use of personnel resources at the university. This article reports on the results of a pilot project comparing the impact of the hybrid course model versus the traditional classroom model on student grades. We also conducted two surveys of students and Teaching Assistants about the perceived impact of web-based grammar and vocabulary drills on in-class activities and student performance. The studies described here, albeit small, support the findings of more extensive surveys of hybrid language courses. We posit that the computer can be well used in hybrid language courses at the level of routinized, lower level skills of cognition while supporting higher level functions, such as communication and writing.