Practical things to try

When you’re starting to consider a HyFlex approach, or you’ve even made a decision to begin this journey, essentially, there are really three major sections of your design and your development process that you should be thinking about.

The first is really the strategic decision to implement HyFlex in your particular course, or maybe a program. Sometimes this decision is made at an institutional level, in which case the institution defines the characteristics of the HyFlex approach. Which modes are required and which modes may be optional. If a faculty, you yourself are just making this decision, then that’s a decision that will help shape your design going forward. So you should have in mind already which modes of participation are you going to provide for students.

Once you’ve decided to do the HyFlex approach, and you have some idea on the modes that are going to be provided, then the next step is really to look at the learning outcomes for the course or the program that you’re considering. The student learning outcomes remember are ones that we want to keep equivalent, no matter which mode a student participates in. Sometimes a course may not be a great fit for HyFlex if the student learning outcomes can’t be met equally well in each of the modes that you would like to provide.

So for example, a course that has a high level of interaction required in an environment such as a laboratory environment, or maybe a studio environment, that may not be a good fit for HyFlex, or at least part of the course may not be a good fit for HyFlex. We have a lot of classes that we’ve taught in the STEM field, where the majority of the class may be available for HyFlex, but part of it is required to be done in person on campus because of the requirements to use specialised equipment. So looking at the student learning outcomes and deciding if there’s a partial HyFlex approach, or maybe some revision to the student learning outcomes that would be required is the next part of this process.

Once you’ve gone through the student learning outcome analysis, and you’ve decided that yes indeed the student learning outcomes can be met in all modes that you’re designed for. Then we go into the detailed design. And this is where we look at the instructional content, and the activities, the interaction, and the assessment approaches that we have designed, and we look to see what we have done already in the classroom, and how that translate to the various online environments that we’re designing for.

So if there’s content I use in the classroom or in the course I’ve been teaching so far, how can I use that in the online version of the course. That is usually a relatively easy decision for us to make, since most of our content is already digital, or can be easily digitised. When I look at assessment approaches, what assessment am I doing now in my regular course? And how does that translate into the online environment? And how do I find ways to make it work for all students equitably?

Third is the engagement part of this. What engagement strategies do I commonly use now in the classroom, and how do those translate into the online environments? Typically the asynchronous online environment requires different engagement approaches than I’m using in the classroom. That’s an important part of the design process because you will not have engaged students unless you are an engaged faculty member. So these three challenges, the strategy, the outcomes, and then the detailed design are really the three main pieces of creating HyFlex.