by Yael Grushka-Cockayne (August 19, 2020)
What Exactly Does Hybrid Mean? Expand Your Thinking
While hybrid approaches aren’t new, with the move en masse to online teaching, there are more ways to think about them. Here are a few different definitions. Determining which apply to your specific circumstance will impact what material you’ll include in your course, and how.
In person and online: What most people think of as a hybrid format is having a combination of online learners and people in a physical room, in person, where you can see them—even if it’s at a distance of six feet, or two meters.
Let’s break this down even further, as each distinction has a huge impact on your teaching plan for the moment, your pedagogy in general, and your curriculum overall. Consider a scenario in which there’s a separation in student experience: Half of your students only log in remotely, and they’re going to engage with each other in a virtual classroom. Then you have some students who are physically in the classroom together. But there’s no mix between the virtual and in-person students. This impacts your choices around team projects and group work in general—think through how you will arrange breakout groups, discussion groups, or any type of activity that requires interaction between students.
Synchronous and asynchronous: Planning for a live online session is very different from thinking about content that is going to be delivered asynchronously. With a synchronous session, you can plan for an hour and a half, maybe two hours tops, of online simultaneous participation, with learners all logging in at the same time. You have discussions, polls, Q&As, debates, breakout rooms, and all other kinds of tools at your disposal. And that variety should be part of your course design: how do you take advantage of everybody’s presence at the same moment in time? You have a live cohort, which experiences something unique together, and this is going to be different from students who watch the recording later.
Conversely, material taught asynchronously, be it through videos, assessments, quizzes, or competitions, is typically chunked much smaller. You want to keep your videos short; you want to keep articles around a five- to seven-minute read; and you want to really focus on keeping your learners engaged in multiple mediums.
Traditional and flipped classrooms: A less common way of understanding hybrid classes focuses on the distinction between theory and practice—when to teach theoretical concepts versus exercises and putting things into practice with a hands-on component. A traditional classroom does theory together, while students explore practice on their own. And in a flipped classroom, students learn the theory by themselves and then come to the classroom to practice together.
Lecture based and student centered: Who’s leading the conversation, you or your students? Knowing whether you will have lecture- or student-centered discussions will make a difference for your ultimate curriculum and for the delivery mode that you choose. For instance, if you choose to do more lectures, then you can have a simulcast with a combination of some students in one room and another bunch of students in a different room. But if you’re doing a discussion, you can’t really do simulcast mode because you want each individual to have the opportunity to raise their hand and participate, and so on.
As you begin to design your curriculum, you can draw from these various approaches at the broader course level—this is a mix of in-person and online students following the flipped classroom model—and at the individual session level—this will be a synchronous, student-led class.
Hybrid Teaching Dos and Don’ts
1. Do focus on preparation. When you’re planning your course, always ask yourself, What are my students doing to prepare for class? Let’s assume that you’re going to have a synchronous session with some students in class and others joining remotely. One way to ensure that everybody shows up ready to get cold called—regardless of whether they’re in the room or not—is by ensuring they were assigned a deliberate quantity of prep work. It doesn’t have to be too much, just meaningful enough that it enables them to come to class and directly talk about it. We want to make sure that students who are joining either remotely or in person are engaged and ready to have a conversation and ask those questions they need an answer to.
When you think about the prep, think about all kinds of things that you can have them do: traditional material such as academic articles, news, and online textbooks; and you can also mix it up with things like games, pictures, and competitions.
2. Do keep classes varied. Break your class into different components and try to keep it moving. Spend a few minutes in breakout rooms, then show a video, then have a student share their screen. Don’t linger on any one component for too long.
3. Do allow time to form connections. After class, you want to encourage students to reflect on the material, which allows for that higher level of engagement to bring in the continuous connection that we are losing a little bit in the virtual world. Those reflections can be done through Slack or any other chat platform, or it can be as simple as starting the next class with takeaways from the previous one. You want to create a link so it’s easy for students to feel like they belong, like they are part of the course.
Here are some approaches you might want to avoid, or at least think about a little bit more in terms of execution.
1. Don’t assign too much reading. Remember that PDFs can be exhausting on the eyes. You can only read so much.
2. Don’t get caught up on the tech. It’s fine to experiment with teaching tools, but take it gradually; see what works, and don’t try too much too soon. Simplicity has a lot of power. If there’s a student you haven’t heard from for a while, you can send them a little message in the chat and let them know you’re going to invite them into the conversation. Even online, engagement doesn’t necessarily have to be heavy on the technology; it’s all about what gives you the confidence to focus on the content, and not on all the other things that we have in front of us right now.
3. Don’t try to cover too much. Plan for less. If you’re really engaging with the students in a hybrid model, that will typically slow you down to the point where you have to consider other ways of delivering the content that will complement the session. Just be thoughtful about that. Don’t expect to cover everything that you would normally cover. Plan differently and assign certain activities in different ways so that students feel satisfied that they will walk away having learned something and not feel rushed out the door.
To learn about more activities, and how to assess students in the hybrid classroom, be sure to read the full article!
