Blended Or Flipped Classrooms? We Need To Enable Integrated Communities Instead

Kate Ames, Director, Learning Design and Innovation at CQUniversity

Right now, there's a good chance you're reading this in one location, while members of your work team are located elsewhere. Some people will be working from home, beaming into meetings via Zoom or Microsoft Teams, while others will experience those same meetings while sitting around a boardroom table as a connection hub.

The rise of distributed, part-virtual/part-office teams has required upskilling by all in technology and reminded us of the importance of clear communication, where expectations and goals are understood across a network so that everyone who needs to be is included in planning and reporting.

Distributed work is not easy, which is why many are defaulting to ¡ return to the office approach. But there's increasing evidence that workers are demanding flexibility and hybrid options even when working as part of a team.

As educators, the same discussions are taking place regarding university classrooms. Do we return to campus? How do we manage a hybrid approach? How do we build a sense of community with our students when they don't want to come to class? How do we manage and support our staff?

“If we are to prepare our students to be career-ready, which is the current global focus of the sector, we need to move beyond blended and flipped options to think about how we enable and support integrated learning communities.”

The past three years of COVID-19-influenced life have taught people a lot about online learning. What they like, what they don't like, how they thought they learned rather than how they do. Most people required to learn formally over the past two years would have been exposed in some form to online learning. It is a space many have occupied for decades, with forays into online education by those less experienced making an impact on quality and experience, and not necessarily positive.

Like workplaces, universities are enabled and constrained by technology solutions. As our Learning Management Systems (LMS) have become more sophisticated, we have increased our reliance on them to engage with students and support their learning. The LMS decision has become quite critical, often focused on a discussion about how it complements face-to-face learning through flipped classrooms of hybrid learning.

If we are to prepare our students to be career-ready, which is the current global focus of the sector, we need to move beyond blended and flipped options to think about how we enable and support integrated learning communities. It is increasingly important to prepare our students so that they are able and skilled to work with others who are not co-located. A return to campus model may work for the university business, and justify a return on capital expense being building rent costs, but it's not helping students practice the skills they need in real and relevant ways - communication, empathy, and engagement.

This is where technology comes in, and the need to think smartly about the way we use it. We can deploy Microsoft Teams. Slack, Trello - whatever tool is most appropriate - within our course delivery models, but if we are segregating students by mode or campus, we are making it easy for us to manage, but missing the opportunity to grow student capability and knowledge.

In my teaching, I have always integrated online and on-campus students, even before technology was a true enabler like it is today. Students pushed back, as they needed to consider such things as the context in which others were studying. Some were part-time and working during the day, some worked shifts, some were parents, some lived at home, and some were couch-surfing and had limited access to the internet. It was tough - on-campus students routinely wanted to just catch up after class, for example, or one distance student would want to do everything themselves because it was easier. The teaching team would explain to students the importance of learning the skills associated with distributed teams, and students valued the experience even if they found it difficult. The importance of setting team charters, understanding personal contexts and availability (and having empathy for situations), establishing communication routines, learning to adapt, and becoming skilled with communication technologies were all part of the journey.

As we move towards a more integrated learning future generally, where micro-credentials and professional learning will align with and embed into higher education qualifications, educators will need to design for integration and think about ways to support collective and collaborative learning communities. Some, but not many, institutions already do this well, successfully supporting online students, professional cohorts, and on-campus students to complete their studies together in one collective class. Others rely on admission and enrolment pathways to separate students into split cohorts, whereby online students are taught as separate entities to those on campus, and micro-credentials are taught entirely independently of the core curriculum on which they are based.

We have the technology to enable integrated community models within our tertiary classrooms but were not placing enough importance on it. Anyone who has beamed into a synchronous meeting, only to find themselves unable to hear the conversation around a table, and having to repeatedly ask people to repeat words or move the microphone, will be familiar with this. In this example, enabling appropriate sound in rooms, or ensuring meeting facilitators always orient to the online community, are simple and available solutions.

It's a system, process, and mindset challenge for the future. It's always going to be easier to work in separate cohorts or teach to an on-campus group. It is what's most valuable moving forward that we need to consider.

Microsoft

Learning Management