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INTRODUCTION
Approximately 75% of the content of a typical doctor of physical therapy (PT) course does not require the instructor and students to be together in the same classroom, laboratory, or clinic. Physical therapist education includes a large amount of psychomotor clinical skills. Traditionally, psychomotor skills are taught face to face in laboratory courses with teacher-led skill introduction and demonstration followed by student practice with instructor feedback (Gaida et al., 2016; Maloney, Storr, Paynter, Morgan, & Ilic, 2013). A goal of hybrid course redesign is to balance elements essential to face to face with those that can be delivered online. Ideally, online and face-toface classrooms work in a symbiotic way without being duplicative. The dynamic nature of learning psychomotor skills makes hybrid redesign of PT courses challenging. This article describes the redesign of a traditional PT lab course using the community of inquiry (CoI) model as a framework and Google Blogger as the main platform for an online skills lab. A description and discussion of course design, time allocations, student learning outcomes, and student perceptions are provided.
Student needs for flexibility and rising health care workforce demands influence a trend toward hybrid delivery in health care education; however, substantiation of the ways technology can effectively replace face-to-face instruction is needed (Brandt, Quake-Rapp, Shanedling, Spannaus-Martin, & Martin, 2010). Hybrid education is a category of distance education in which online activities replace face-to-face activities. This contrasts with other models of blended learning such as a flipped classroom, which incorporate online instruction as an adjunct to face-to-face instruction without a reduction of face-to-face time. Garrison and Vaughn (2008) described hybrid or blended learning as a "thoughtful fusion of face-to-face and online learning experiences" (p. 8). The Col model provides a framework for hybrid course design using online and face-to-face instruction in a way that each mode enhances without duplicating the other (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2010). The mixture of online and face-to-face activities varies from case to case (Means et al., 2013). In the CoI model, three essential components overlap to create an educational experience: teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence (Garrison & Vaughn, 2008; see Figure 1). Teaching presence is the design of class activities, facilitation of discourse, and direction of instruction. Cognitive presence comes as...