Clarification of Terms

We've been bombarded with some new terms over the past few years - hybrid, hyflex, asynchronous, and the like. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Likely, many of these terms are not actually new - the concepts having been around for many years. What IS new is the actual implementation of said instructional and meeting strategies. I wanted to make a table of terminology for myself so as to not get confused.

Web Facilitated Course

A course would be labelled as Web Facilitated when less than 30% of course content is delivered to students online through a learning management system (LMS). Arguably, this is basically every college / university classroom. Items usually posted include the syllabus, content documents (PDF, PPT), announcements, and maybe a few supplemental materials.

Blended Teaching

Blended Learning (or a blended teaching model in this case) is the bucket term used to indicate the purposeful integration of online and in-person components of teaching and learning. The 'blending' of the in-person and online components can look very different from course to course and may even look different week to week within a course. A course would be labelled as blended when between 30% - 80% of the course content is provided online, with the remaining content and active learning strategies provided in-person.

Flipped Teaching

Teaching using a Flipped Classroom model is a specific type of blended learning. In this case, learning starts online. Students are exposed to and engage with online content (reading, images, videos, etc.) and this is typically coupled with some form of pre-assessment or preparatory activity that students complete before attending an in-person lecture. Students have the flexibility to choose where and when they complete the pre (and any post) class work. During the in-person lecture time, the instructor engages students with themselves, with each other, and with the content to focus on analyzing and synthesizing knowledge.

Online Teaching: Synchronous and Asynchronous

A course would be labelled as being a fully Online Course if more than 80% of the course content is delivered to students - you guessed it - online through a learning management system (LMS). These courses would include little to no face-to-face time with students.

Generally, we can broadly categorize online teaching as being either synchronous or asynchronous. Asynchronous teaching means that the teaching components do not occur at a specific time - access to these materials exists within the LMS and students are free to work through the content at their own pace at times conducive to their schedule. Synchronous teaching means that the teaching happens at a scheduled time and is provided in an online setting. This usually occurs over a virtual meeting platform such as Zoom, WebEx or Teams. In this case, the instructor is the one who sets the time and "place" of the formal teaching event.

Hybrid Teaching

It is (unfortunately) common for people to use the terms 'hybrid' and 'blended' interchangeably, insinuating that they mean the same thing. To make matters worse, the term 'hybrid' teaching is defined using the same definition as blended learning in a lot of scholarly sources. Maybe pre-pandemic they meant the same, but post-pandemic, they take on different meanings. We are probably most familiar with using the term hybrid in relation to meetings as I'm sure almost everyone reading this has been in a hybrid meeting (or 1, 207, 356 of them) over the past couple of years.

Many instructors offer what they call 'hybrid' lectures - students can attend in-person or attend a live-stream of the lecture from a place of their choosing. This lecture may or may not be recorded for later viewing purposes. But the point remains that students would have the choice on how to 'show up for class' on a lecture-by-lecture basis. I'll be honest here and say that I tend to think of this as hybrid teaching - mainly because I hear others speak of it that way. This is truly HyFlex teaching, which I talk about in the next section.

So, what is Hybrid Teaching then? Hybrid teaching (or my personal understanding of hybrid teaching) means that the lecture is taking place at a specific time and is available for students to attend in-person or synchronously online by watching a live-stream of the lesson. However, the student chooses ahead of time whether they will be an 'in-person' learner or an 'online' learner (in theory anyway), and that is how that student engages with the course for the entire semester. If they choose to learn online, then there is no switching to in-person, and vice versa. Hybrid teaching does not mean that all students will receive a mixture of online and face-to-face learning environments - they will receive one OR the other.

In Hybrid classrooms, there may also be two distinct assessment arms: one for those who will attend all lectures in-person and one for those who will attend all lectures online. This does not have to be the case, but is a strategy commonly employed.

HyFlex Teaching

Hybrid Flexible Teaching, coined HyFlex for short, combines components of hybrid and online teaching. A HyFlex teaching model provides students (and instructors) with options: 1) attend class in-person, 2) attend class by watching the live-stream of the class from somewhere outside of the classroom, and 3) attend class by watching a recording of the lecture at a later date (of course, this is only an option if the live-stream was recorded).

Unlike a Hybrid Teaching model, where there may be two distinct assessment arms, the HyFlex teaching model returns to that single assessment arm: one assessment model for all students. Students have the flexibility to choose, lecture-to-lecture, whether or not they will attend in-person or online.

This can be a nice model for instructors as well as it provides them the opportunity to lecture from elsewhere (say while attending a conference) to have guest speakers teach their class, and potentially, team-teach a course with an instructor from a different institution while live-streaming said instructor into your classroom over the virtual meeting platform.

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References:

Brame, C. (2013). Flipping the classroom. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved September 19, 2023, from http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom/.

Calafiore, P. & Giudici, E. (2021). Hybrid versus Hyflex instruction in an introductory finance course. International Journal of Education Research 16(1), 40+.

Garrison, D. R., & Kanuka, H. (2004). Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher education. Internet and Higher Education, 7, 95–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iheduc.2004.02.001.

Hrastinski, S. (2019). What do we mean by blended learning? TechTrends, 63, 564–569. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-019-00375-5