Hybrid and Hyflex Teaching in the Sciences and Engineering

Allison Luengen, ENVS

Amalia Kokkinaki, ENVS, ENGR

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CTE/ETS 3D Symposium: Dream, Discern, Design

A classroom demo over Zoom illustrates some of the promises and the challenges of remote teaching

• Introduction and motivation
• Part A: Remote-friendly courses: activities and technology to support them
• Discussion: Your input
• Part B: Limitations of remote: activities, content, and student intrinsic motivation
• Discussion: Your input

Outline

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Hybrid vs. Hyflex

Hybrid - teaching the entire class either remotely or in person

Hyflex - teaching to some students in person while others are simultaneously on Zoom

Remote - teaching in either the hybrid or hyflex formats

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Hyflex teaching in a hyflex classroom using the whiteboard view

Why use a remote format?

• In a survey of 17 graduate students enrolled in an MS Level Research Methods course in Fall 2020, 76% of students preferred material to be entirely remote or mostly remote
• That interest in remote instruction remained high with 93% of the students in Fall 2021 saying that Research Methods should be remote or mostly remote
• Chronicle of Higher Ed*: Survey of 801 high school and college: 27 - 28% prefer entirely remote, 24-27% prefer hybrid

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*Deciphering a new generation of learners

Hyflex-friendly classes are discussion based

• Remote students can still have live interaction/discussion with other remote students
• A video recording of instructor is useful for all students
• Graduate level classes where students are intrinsically motivated to participate
• Building a collaborate slide deck (e.g., with Google sheets) works well for both in-person and remote students

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Hyflex classroom discussion using the rear camera view

When remote works well: discussion-based computer exercises

• Use the map at https://pacinst.org/reports/sea_level_rise/gmap.html to explore seal level rise in a California location of interest to you.
• Answer the following question in a Canvas assignment, “How would a 100-year flood affect your area (under current conditions or with sea level rise)? You will work in a group to compare places, but you should each type up your own response for your chosen location. You only need to answer for one location.”

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Remote students explored a sea-level rise map in small breakout rooms

Breakout rooms to discuss a paper/figure/table

• Prepare groups beforehand and have them preloaded into Canvas or Google slides
• A lot of know-how in this area, similar set up to workshops, think-pair-share, students respond well
• The activity is usually well defined:
• Review the figure and write 3 sentences about what we learn from it.
• Student input is in text format, and can be easily shared

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In-person students write notes on a giant sticky note; a similar format can be created over Zoom

Remote Discussion Activity

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Students read the same material and collaboratively summarize the main points and/or make comparisons between different cases they read about

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Incorporating the board

• Hyflex classrooms
• audio is sufficient to hear students in the classroom
• multiple camera angles can capture
• entire front of classroom
• whiteboard
• lectern
• audience
• Portable zoom kit
• need external microphone
• impossible to hear students in classroom
• no camera adjustment

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Hyflex teaching using a hyflex classroom

Hyflex teaching using a portable zoom kit

Recommendations for making hyflex technology work

• Check hyflex classroom functionality before the semester begins
• There is no standard set of camera angles
• Hyflex technology may be messed up
• Allow at least 10 min of setup time
• Be aware of what your remote audience is seeing and hearing
• enable Zoom to share sound
• check that “presenter view” is not sharing your notes with remote audience

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• Mark whiteboard with camera angles
• Make sure that your remote audience is audible and will shout out for help

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A misalignment between the camera and the writing on the whiteboard illustrates a challenge of teaching in the hyflex format

Discussion: When remote worked

• Share some of your successes with using zoom in your classroom
• What technology worked best for you?
• What activities worked well remotely?
• Share students’ input to questions about hyflex instruction

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Remote challenges

• Anything that needed to be handwritten remotely requires an additional gadget
• Wacom’s did not work well
• Writing on an Ipad works well but takes away the functionality to share your screen on zoom
• The combination of the XP-Pen with Microsoft’s Onenote worked well when a reliable internet connection was available, but used a lot of bandwidth, at times slowing down zoom.

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Wacom tablets were not an effective way to present remote material

The XP-Pen worked but had its caveats

Planned and unplanned hyflex instruction

• Requires planning and clear communication to the students so that planning can be done ahead of time
• Example: preloading recorded jigsaw content into Canvas for a parallel exercise
• Can it be done on an ad-hoc basis?
• Students getting sick?
• Students choosing to stay home due to distance?
• No classroom availability?

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Student feedback on unplanned hyflex

“This class is significantly more difficult online, and I wouldn't suggest it be hybrid.”

“I think it would be better if next time [the instructor] prepares for the remote part of the class better.”

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Students may expect that they should be getting the same experience whether in person or remote. That is not possible for certain content so communication of options and implications early on is important.

Student feedback on unplanned hyflex

“The class is great as is in my opinion, the coursework feels very streamlined. The only suggestion I'd like to give is to explore better options for remote learning (i.e, Zoom) regarding video quality and audio quality. The camera placement doesn't cover the full blackboard.”

Survey of students in undergraduate elective in Spring 2022:

Do you have any suggestions for improvements, observations about what is working well for you, or other comments?

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The quality of recording with a portable Zoom kit is poor

But will hyflex work for any content, even if you have the right technology and have planned for it?

Context: Fall 2022, ENGR202 Modeling Sustainable Systems

• A course about using mathematics and programming to predict the behavior of natural and engineered systems
• Heavy in mathematical board work (calculus)
• Dense in group problem solving on paper or on board
• Has a computational lab that requires frequent guidance and intervention by the faculty

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Keeping attendance mode flexible. Did it work?

1. Students self-selected whether they wanted to be remote or in person.
2. Communication: it was verbally communicated and written in the syllabus that this is not a hyflex class.
3. Resources: Zoom kit in a non hyflex classroom
4. ​

7 students in person, 5 students on zoom. Of the 5, there were 2 strong students and 3 who needed support

Students did not take that to be “the class is not designed for the hyflex format”

The best available technology could not facilitate the class activities

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Best available technology did not work

For regular lecture (one-direction teaching, students passive listening):

• Remote students turn their cameras off
• Neither remote nor in person students can see the entire classroom
• The board is not visible, and writing of non-text content on the board even harder to follow
• Setup time is too long

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Better engagement for in-person students

For activities (group-based, hands-on multi-directional learning):

• In person students received all the benefits of the exercise.
• Even those shy students, with encouragement, participated.
• Remote students did not collaborate because that required extra technology on their part (writing on an ipad)
• The instructor could not help remote students as a group

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• Class demos can only be watched
• All kinesthetic exercises are lost

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Remote students missed out on interactive, hands on class activities

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Group 1

Group 2

Active dialogue and engagement are most effective when the whole group is together

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• For remote students to have similar experiences via zoom they need to have the ability to hand write on a common board
• Still, the remote students cannot benefit from the conversations and guidance happening in the classrooms.
• Younger students, do not have the intrinsic motivation to think critically and thoroughly about the activity on their own.

Best available technology

did not work

For activities that require active computer work and analysis skills (programming, data analysis)

• Remote students - Bimodal
• Strong students finished the work but do not engage
• Everybody else struggles and does not engage.
• Helping remote students requires individual screen sharing and full instructor attention on the screen, while in person instructor can multitask.
• Remote students feel isolated and unassisted.

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Lab activities

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• In person students require hands on help but can also help each other live in the classroom.

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Student maturity and motivation is key to hyflex working

• Remote students need to exercise significant self-management and be communicative to keep up with the in-person class
• Undergraduate students will struggle in a hyflex format in courses where they have to learn technical content with significant problem solving or other skill building (e.g. lab work)
• Graduate students effectively communicated the types of material that they found too DIFFICULT to follow in a remote format

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Students participating may find it harder to participate in a spontaneous discussion of the figure

Discussion: Engaging with students in the hyflex format

• What limitations did you have engaging with students remotely? Did you find ways to overcome these?
• Share some of your successes with using zoom in your classroom with different types of students
• What audience worked best for you?
• Did you have to change your classes to make it work? How did this affect the content you could cover?

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Conclusions

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1. Discussion based activities work well in the remote format
2. Class that involve hands-on activities should use a hybrid format, where all students show up in person to participate in the activity and are remote on other days
3. The format for graduate students can be more flexible, as they are cognizant enough of their own learning process to articulate their needs
4. Hyflex format needs significant advanced planning to be effective
5. Communicating expectations to remote students is crucial

The early days of the pandemic when everybody was smiling are gone, but remote learning is probably here to stay