COVID19: Flexibility and Creativity

COVID is annoying for so many reasons. It has been annoying in education — closing schools, starkly revealing the technology divide among students (and parents), over-saturation with screens…the list goes on. These annoyances, inconveniences, and frustrations, however, do a lot to force people who may not know or think much about space and simple accessibility to do so, laying bare some of the problems with pedagogies and with systems.

Infographic by Jenae Cohn, https://bit.ly/382niQD

This has been an incredible opportunity to embrace and explore flexibility, possibly the cornerstone of teaching as we are learning as pre-service teachers. Flexibility was demanded early and it was demanded fast, and its necessity in the last several months has allowed many people to come up with creative solutions to pedagogical problems that may have been thrown into dramatic relief with COVID but which were already there, lying in the shadows, being not quite enough of an issue to reveal their hiding places.

One such now-obvious problem has to do with a reliance on computers for education. It seems many folks would assume that computers are the future for school, as they seem to be for everything else. While being able to access education regardless of locale via the Internet is a great thing, leaning further and further on computers creates other barriers to access. Those in remote communities or those who can’t afford a stable enough Internet connection may get left behind.

This seems to be where HyFlex — hybrid flexible — learning comes in: provide access to all based on individual needs by offering the option to do a class/course/program either in person or online (or a mix of both) while offering, ostensibly, the same experience to all learners in the class. This seems to be a model embraced by many for tackling the question of how to educate effectively during a global pandemic.

But has it proven to be an effective solution, or is it a better idea than it is a practice?

 Experiencing the Downsides of HyFlex

“In HyFlex classrooms, in particular, it is easy for remote students to disconnect and feel neglected by those taking part in the physical classroom” — Maria Angel Ferrero, ” Hybrid Flexible Class: A Professor’s Guide to Hyflex Teaching; How to conquer teaching during a pandemic

I experienced this feeling of disconnect and neglect recently in a hybrid class — one that I am usually physically in but had to attend remotely as I was awaiting COVID test results. A guest speaker came in, who rearranged the class in a way that the online learners ended up being completely excluded. Those of us who were attending from a distance were able to neither hear nor participate. The instructors probably didn’t know that the class would be rearranged, and the guest speaker probably hasn’t been using a HyFlex model so probably hadn’t anticipated that rearranging the setup would be alienating. Those in person in the class probably hadn’t been in the handful of distance learners for a class that is primarily in-person before, so I don’t think they were cognizant of how we may have been left out. It was nobody’s fault, but boy, it sure was frustrating. This class isn’t true HyFlex — lectures/in-person classes aren’t recorded and have to be attended synchronously by those attending online. I can see these frustrations being found, though, in true HyFlex models, particularly for classes that rely on a large amount of student interaction for learning (as opposed to didactic lectures which can easily be recorded).

Prior to this class, the semi-hybrid model seemed to work rather well, at least from what I’ve heard from those who normally video into class. It seems, then, that HyFlex learning can be great — until you introduce one confounding variable. HyFlex, then, almost ironically demands a type of control on the part of teachers that may be easier to relinquish when all learners are learning in the same mode.

What do you do, for instance, if you have a hybrid in-person/online model but there is one student who can’t attend school because they’re immunocompromised but whose family maybe can’t afford the most reliable internet connection or perhaps have one family computer? Do you sacrifice the ability of in-person learners to use licensed software on school computers because online learners can’t access that software? How do you plan it in a way that online learners aren’t experiencing screen burnout? How do you facilitate a sense of community when some of your students can’t read the body language of others or use their own body language to communicate?

Ferrero points to the need to do a lot of advanced preparation and planning and to ensure you and your students have access to the right tools, but how do you shift and meet students’ needs when a confounding variable enters the picture to disrupt all that planning and preparation?

The Solution to Everything…

Derek Bruff suggests that one way to address the problems that will inevitably come up in hybrid classrooms is to do the thing that seems to be the solution to most things in teaching — care about your students’ wellbeing and check in about it regularly. It’s easy to sit here and conjecture about what problems can come up and how to address them, but usually the fastest way to see if something is working for people is to ask them. I think this is particularly important for the online learners. It can be really difficult to voice your concerns when your literal voice isn’t being heard because you’re not in a room. The backchannel, it seems, can often get lost to the front channel — perhaps because teachers just aren’t really used to having to monitor an in-person group and an online group at the same time, or perhaps simply because it’s much harder to be more attuned to a disembodied voice on a computer who can’t communicate physically at all.

The idea behind HyFlex is that those who opt to move between in-person and online learning or who opt for online when the in-person option is available won’t be penalized for doing so. But being penalized and having one’s learning aversely affected are two different things. And those averse affects can go both ways — the learning of all is affected when problems come up and have to be addressed all together as a class.

This seems to really present a problem for educators — like myself — who do not yet have any idea what they’re doing at all when it comes to teaching, whether it be online or in person. How do we approach a model like this when we have (compared to teachers in active service for years) little to no experience working within any model?

While these problems are certainly very real, the fact that we can have such realistic discussions about how to provide maximally flexible, accessible, and effective learning is encouraging. Just like all solutions we’ve ever introduced to address the problems of education, this one will not be perfect — but it is promising.