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Colleges and universities are exploring the possibilities of teaching residential and online students simultaneously, within one course, via a modality commonly known as hybrid flexible, or HyFlex, and known by other names, including blended, blended synchronous learning, blendflex, gxLearning, hybrid, HyFlex blended, remote live participation, synchromodal, and synchronous hybrid learning. In this article, we share the logistics and lessons learned from a 2-year pilot of this course, including perspectives from faculty, teaching associates, and students. As the interest in this type of course grows, we hope that sharing this experience will be helpful for faculty and administrators.
Keywords: blended, blended synchronous learning, blendflex, gxLearning, hybrid, Hyflex, hyhlex blended, online teaching, remote live participation, SLIDE, synchromodal, synchronous hybrid learning
In response to the challenges of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities are turning to the possibilities of teaching residential and online students simultaneously, within one course, via a modality commonly known as HyFlex (Beatty, 2020; Lederman, 2020; Maloney & Kim, 2020, McMurtrie, 2020; Milman et al., 2020). HyFlex is a mode of teaching that some institutions have used since the 2000s, but its popularity is accelerating.
At Columbia University7 s School of Social Work, we conducted a 2-year pilot of a version of this type of course. In this article, we share our experience, including our logistics, lessons learned, and faculty, teaching associates', and students' perspectives.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Many universities allow remote students to participate in residential courses via web-conferencing or robotic telepresence devices. This approach, teaching a combination of online and in-person students together in one course, is different from blended or hybrid courses (Allen et al., 2007) that include class segments in which all students are online together and class seg- ments in which all students are in one physical classroom together. In the type of course described in this article, students attend the same classes synchronously every week, either online or in person.
Universities and programs use a variety of language to refer to this type of course offering (see Table 1). Beatty (2007) describes his course design at San Francisco State University as HyFlex, and the University of St. Thomas and Columbia School of Professional Studies use HyFlex as well (Lieberman, 2018; Columbia University, 2020). The University of Texas...