Issue #40
1. The paper
Differences in Students’ Perceptions of the Community of Inquiry in a Blended Synchronous Delivery Mode.
I’ve recently spent long days thinking about what Fall 2021 instruction might look like at my institution. In speaking with colleagues across the country, and in reading recent “back to campus for Fall 21” messages, one approach to teaching comes up again and again: hyflex (if you’re not yet familiar with that approach, see this week’s first resource).
Full disclosure: I don’t think hyflex is the panacea to the instructional challenges we’ll face this fall. Why? Cue this week’s paper to offer some insight!
A “blended synchronous delivery mode” or BSDM (one mistype away from a very different initialism) is defined as “…learning and teaching where distant students participate in face-to-face class sessions by means of video conferencing and web conferencing” (p.2), and is an instructional approach close to hyflex. One key difference between BSDM and hyflex is that BSDM does not offer students the ability to move between modalities week to week the same way that hyflex would.
The lit review (pp. 2-3) identifies some of the known challenges of the BSDM approach, including: poor institutional support; additional instructor workload; an “us and them” phenomena between students; potential for student exclusion; and difficulty in communicating. Hyflex (vs. BSDM) might offer a solution to some perceptions of student exclusion, as students are offered the freedom to move to and from the physical classroom.
The results of this research (of students in a nursing program, with an instructor in one location with students, and other classmates spread between two other locations) revealed that the in-person students reported a stronger sense of teaching presence than those at a distance. The discussion (pp. 8-10) provides findings that I would hope any institution would review and consider before implementing a wholesale hyflex (or BSDM) approach this fall.
Being honest, I did find myself reading between the lines in the paper’s findings. Single statements like: “Further research on onsite students’ frustrations (when the teacher interacts with online students, for instance) could be explored in future work too” (p. 12) piques my curiosity and increases my skepticism around adopting the approach for one-time instruction in the Fall.
Now, this is not to say that hyflex can’t be done well. But it takes: a willing instructor, supported in multiple ways (e.g. professional development, course design, workload considerations); learners ready and willing to learn via the modality; and the proper classroom technology and AV design to allow all students equal opportunity to engage.
It seems a tall order to manoeuvre all those pieces together for Fall.
Laforune, A.-M., & Lakhal, S. (2019). Differences in Students’ Perceptions of the Community of Inquiry in a Blended Synchronous Delivery Mode. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 45(3). (Link)
2. The resource
7 things you should know about…the hyflex course model
Educause (as US-based non-profit community “of technology, academic, industry, and campus leaders advancing higher education through the use of IT”) published a two page summary of the hyflex course model (PDF alert) in 2020 that provides a succinct overview of the instructional approach.
3. The other resource
Our HyFlex Experiment: What’s Worked and What Hasn’t
No tool this week…but an “advice” column published in the Chronicle in October 2020, written by Dr. Kevin Gannon.
I want to note one hyflex “ah-ha” moment I had that was also echoed in this article: an initial proponent of hyflex, Dr. Brian Beatty, successfully used the approach to facilitate graduate courses (pdf alert). The kind of student here is a key detail that makes hyflex make more sense: smaller enrolment courses, typical of graduate school, with more “mature” learners seem to be key characteristics of the success of the approach.
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
And you aren’t wrong: the newsletter’s back this week after a two week break (due to life and work). Thanks, as always, for reading!
Thanks Gavan. This is timely. We are to discuss just how we might support our faculty here at NorQuest with Hyflex later this morning. I appreciate your emails, as always. I do something similar for our instructors at NQ: https://jeffkuntz.weebly.com/blog-on-ps-education and I understand the challenge of having something week in and week out.