A director of a Canadian teaching and learning centre described hyflex in the following way: "Hyflex sounds sexy, but it's like beer-goggle sexy. When you soberly look at the costs and the pedagogical challenges, it's far less attractive."
The pandemic has intensified interest in hyflex (hybrid-flexible) learning modalities, but the idea was developed by Brian Beatty in 2006. Hyflex learning environments offer synchronous instruction to both face-to-face and distance students. To paint the prettiest picture of hyflex, all learning activities address and support learning outcomes regardless of the delivery medium, affording students flexibility and freedom. In a hyflex offering, a student could choose to attend class in the face-to-face environment, remotely through their computer, or watch a recording so that the learning objectives and results remain equivalent. At its best, hyflex provides learner choice and enhances accessibility.
But making the learning experience equivalent for the student learning at a distance is the primary challenge. When the instructor is physically present with other human beings in the same space and time, the natural inclination is to favour the in-person students, which is why some recommend building a hyflex course as if it was an online course. To bridge the gap and make the distance student more present, the physical hyflex classroom is often equipped with several, large video screens, ambient microphones and 360 degree cameras so that the instructor and the remote students can be virtually "face-to-face" with the other learners present in the classroom. This increases the technological complexity of the learning experience and increases the cognitive load for the instructor.
Faculty cannot just walk in the room and teach the way they did before. They will be running an in-person classroom AND recording a videoconferencing session. The instructor needs to plan for content and student learning activities. Lectures should be relatively short (15-20 minutes), engage the learners with generative learning activities (utilizing small breakout groups AND breakout rooms), and employ authentic assessments to evaluate student learning.
It’s still too early to tell what permanent changes will result from the pandemic, but that is becoming apparent is the many instructors have changed their approaches to shorter, more engaging video lectures and fewer high-stakes exams, encouraging both group discussion and collaboration. Recent research suggests that, as a result of these pandemic-related adjustments in course design and teaching approaches, students might be studying harder, leading Richard Arum (co-author of Academically Adrift) to say that the pandemic’s big lesson is, “When you move to more engaging, participatory, interactive instructional strategies, student academic engagement goes up.”
Implementing effective active learning strategies presents challenges for many faculty, and low interactivity is a known failing of many online learning opportunities. Creating active/interactive learning experiences for students learning both in-person and at a distance is a formidable challenge
Personally, I am not yet sold on hyflex. Online learning (when it is freely chosen and not forced upon us by a pandemic) has enough evidence behind it to show that it can offer high-quality learning experience when intentionally designed with the distance learner in mind. Face-to-face learning experiences facilitate the construction of a well-connected learning community more easily.
But here's what I know. Several other institutions are exploring hyflex learning and spending lots of money through classroom transformation projects. As several other technological implementations and adoptions have shown, over time, some institutions and their faculty will figure out how to do hyflex well, and those that do will be able to offer academic opportunities that increase competition in the marketplace. That’s the most sobering thought of all, and the best reason to experiment to see how hyflex can work at MHC.
Thank you to Rene Hemenway and Michael Pin-Chuan Lin for helping provide background research for this article.
HyFlex Learning with David Rhoads - Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast
Hybrid-Flexible Course Design: Implementing student-directed hybrid classes by Brian Beatty
What To Expect In A Hyflex Course: Faculty Handbook by Texas A&M San Antonio
High Enrollment and HyFlex: The Case for an Alternative Course Model