John Nolan likes running an active classroom. A lecturer in the college of business at the University of Nevada at Reno, he favors the Socratic method as he walks among his 150 or so business-law students.
So when the university announced that it will offer courses under a hybrid model known as HyFlex, in which professors teach simultaneously to students in the classroom and others beaming in remotely, Nolan wondered how that could possibly work. If he walks away from the podium, he moves out of sight of the camera. If a student in the back of class asks a question, those tuning in on their laptops might not hear. And how can he foster lively discussions, let alone group work, when half his students are masked, sitting six feet apart because of Covid-19 restrictions, and the others are virtual?
“HyFlex doesn’t really do anybody any good,” he says. “It’s basically, you take the worst parts of in person and online teaching and mix it together.”
Nolan’s skepticism is shared by a growing number of faculty members, as more colleges choose the HyFlex model for the fall. It also reflects a rift between administrators and professors, who are raising alarms over the health risks of teaching in person, and about the logistical, technical, and pedagogical complications of the model itself. Search HyFlex on Facebook and Twitter and you’ll come across comments like this one: “Whoever the hell thought of this is a bean counter, not an educator, and an idiot.”
But as colleges scramble to figure out how to re-open campuses, it’s easy to see why HyFlex holds appeal. It offers something to everyone: Students who can’t come to campus can still receive “live” teaching. Those who want a residential experience can have one. And classes are able to hew to social-distancing guidelines by following schedules in which on-campus students divide and rotate between in-person or online attendance.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
HyFlex itself is a precise term, describing a teaching model started at San Francisco State University in 2006 to accommodate working adult students in a graduate program. The “flex” in HyFlex is supposed to mean that students — not administrators — choose how to attend class on any given day. That kind of flexibility isn’t an option under Covid-19, because colleges will need to control how many students are in the classroom. But the broader idea, of offering a course that is taught simultaneously in person and online, has been adopted and branded by universities looking to reassure students that they have all bases covered. Northeastern University is touting NUFlex. Northern Arizona University offers NAUFlex, and Shenandoah University has created ShenFlex.
Teaching experts and others familiar with hybrid teaching say that HyFlex can work, but it requires effective technology, careful planning, instructional support, and creative course design. That’s not always possible when colleges are still operating in crisis mode, with instructors worn out from the spring pivot to remote teaching and wary of returning to the classroom in the fall. Tight budgets and speedy decision making can add to those stresses.
“If HyFlex is part of the plan, it has to be done with faculty participation,” says Brian Beatty, an associate professor of instructional technologies at San Francisco State, who created the model. “Otherwise, if it’s top down and the administration is saying, We’re doing this, then the faculty are saying, But why are we doing this?”
Tensions over HyFlex are playing out at Reno, where administrators have been wrestling with how to bring students back to campus while observing social-distancing guidelines. Jill Heaton, vice provost for faculty affairs, said that Faculty Senate representatives, deans, and department chairs were part of the decision-making process to adopt the approach.
But after faculty and staff members received a letter from the provost in early June, explaining that under the new model, half of students in a course would attend in person, and half through Zoom, alternating throughout the course, faculty members pushed back.
The Reno chapter of the Nevada Faculty Alliance, of which Nolan is president, circulated a petition arguing that HyFlex has “a limited pedagogical evidence base” and that instructors should maintain control over how they teach their classes. “We want to teach our courses well,” the alliance wrote, “and believe that faculty are in the best position to determine the best method of instruction for their courses consistent with the health and safety of students and themselves.” More than 200 of the university’s 1,100 instructional faculty members have signed the petition so far.
Heaton acknowledged that some instructors won’t be happy with this decision but said that “allowing faculty to decide individually how to deliver their courses in the fall would create confusion in an already confusing time.” She noted that a survey showed that students expressed “a very strong desire to have some in-person residential experience on campus.”
Faculty members and the administration have since been negotiating the details of how some courses are taught, said Nolan. But it remains unclear what, exactly, an in-person classroom experience will mean this fall at Reno. Depending on which phase of reopening the state of Nevada is in, courses with enrollments above either 30 or 200 would be fully online.
To help instructors adopt HyFlex, the university’s teaching and technology experts are putting cameras in classrooms, assisting instructors in developing online videos for students who need to attend asynchronously, and providing modest stipends for faculty members to take a course-design workshop.
“We’re asking faculty to envision this more as an online course with a live lecture component rather than thinking of this as a face-to-face course with online stuff,” says Ed Huffman, director of teaching and learning technologies for the university. He hopes that his department’s efforts, including a training program, calm faculty members worried that they’re effectively expected to create two courses in one.
The idea of designing a whole new method of course delivery, one that works both online and in person, is one reason why HyFlex has so many critics. “It’s asking faculty to rethink their course again after they barely got a chance to do it online,” says Andrea Aebersold, director of faculty instructional development at the University of California at Irvine. Her university chose to go mostly online in the fall, she says, in part because a committee she was on, focused on teaching and learning, strongly opposed HyFlex.
Aebersold cited other challenges. It would take millions of dollars for her university to outfit classrooms with the necessary technology. HyFlex would also require Irvine to significantly ramp up instructional-design support for professors. And there didn’t seem to be a strong enough reason to return to the classroom under current restrictions. “It wasn’t clear to me what were the gains of doing this,” she says.“They’re still six feet apart and all wearing masks.”
Much of what bothers professors about the push for HyFlex is that so many details about its mechanics remain ill defined. And assumptions about its value seem rooted in a particular idea of teaching, one where the professor stands at the front of a classroom and lectures.
“So many people seem to think you just turn on a webcam and what’s the difference?” says Rob Elliott, a senior lecturer of computer-information technology at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. “They don’t see that I walk 12,000 steps a day on the days I teach.”
Elliott prides himself on his lively approach, moving around his classroom as students work at tables or whiteboards. “I cannot teach a course with half of the students in a socially distanced classroom and half in a Zoom room simultaneously,” he wrote one day on Twitter, after trying to think through how HyFlex would work for him. “People think I’m being a crank.”
His comment received more than 46,000 likes. Others pushed back on his post, which suggested to him that many people think teaching is simply lecturing.
IUPUI has not adopted HyFlex, but, he says, “the general idea of it has been suggested as an option for some of our courses.” Elliott says his colleagues, including his department chair and dean, have supported instructors as they’ve wrestled with the best way to teach in the fall. But when he tries to get answers from the university at large about how a hybrid-teaching model would actually work, he doesn’t get a satisfactory response.
“My irritation was that this completely different beast was so casually tossed out: ‘Oh sure, just do it this way.’ I don’t want to teach my courses by the seat of my pants.”
Online-teaching experts say they’ve seen this tension play out nationally: A university might promote a version of HyFlex on its website, begin installing microphones and cameras in the classrooms, and offer some training in online teaching, but largely leave it to professors to sort out the details.
“We are the ones holding the bag if this does not work, or if it’s chaos,” says Michelle Miller, a psychology professor at Northern Arizona University and author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively With Technology.
Miller has cautioned universities against designing HyFlex-inspired programs without faculty input, because doing so, she says, can lead to the assumption that professors need only “come in and push a button and record.”
Miller is a fan of the original HyFlex model from San Francisco State, but says that colleges need to be mindful that the conditions under which it’s now being adapted — quickly, at scale, and without giving students much choice — will limit its effectiveness. She was not involved in developing Northern Arizona’s version of HyFlex, called NAUFlex, but expects that it could face some of the same challenges that other institutions have when rolling out any tech-enhanced hybrid-teaching model.
To work effectively, she says, hybrid teaching requires a lot of support, such as having teaching assistants help manage the complexities of working simultaneously with two different audiences. Otherwise it risks becoming a “lecture-centric, passive consumption view of learning.” That goes against years of hard work faculty members have been doing to make their classrooms more inclusive, active, and engaged.
“If we’re not going to at least acknowledge that,” she says, “it’s going to fall apart and fall apart fast.”
Some small colleges have been eager adopters of HyFlex. Beatty, who created HyFlex and has been busy through the spring and summer running workshops and consulting with a range of colleges, noted that about two-thirds of the institutions he has worked with are small and private.
One of them is Shenandoah University, where Amy Sarch, the associate provost, has been overseeing the development of its version, called ShenFlex. Shenandoah is promising students will have both “significant” face-to-face time in the classroom along with an integrated online experience.
Shenandoah has benefited from choosing this model relatively early, Sarch says, giving it a head start on other campuses. The university hosted a webinar with Beatty in May, then a two-week HyFlex workshop for faculty leaders. Those professors organized retreats and workshops for their colleagues to discuss how to adapt HyFlex to different departments and disciplines. This summer, faculty members are enrolling in training programs through the campus teaching and learning center focused on both online and hybrid teaching.
For now, professors have many logistical questions, Sarch says, like how to take attendance, whether to require online students to turn on their cameras, and how much of the teaching has to be face to face. It helps, she says, that Shenandoah is small, with about 460 full- and part-time faculty members, and that its teaching and technology experts can spend time one on one with professors as needed.
To help think through pedagogical challenges, faculty groups are testing out teaching strategies, some departments meet weekly to discuss course design, and a student-leadership team is providing feedback and creating online tools to help their peers learn effectively online. Even so, the process has been challenging and frustrating at times for faculty members. “We get a lot of, Do you realize we’re working over this summer and not getting paid?” Sarch says.
Professors are both looking for templates and wanting to maintain control over their courses, which inevitably creates tension with the administration. “We keep saying to them, This is all theoretical,” Sarch says. “Think of it like a pilot and you’re helping us figure this out.” That’s not the most reassuring message, she knows. But she can’t promise anything neat and tidy. “It makes me nervous to even say, Wow, ShenFlex is awesome. I hope it is. But we don’t know yet.”
Beatty has tried to avoid wading into the debate over the merits of adopting HyFlex, but he has noticed that instructors often panic when they first read about it. Yes, HyFlex is time intensive. But there are ways to adapt it to the current situation, he says. In a larger classroom, professors can ask students to assist with monitoring a chat function in Zoom, for example, if the college is unable to provide a teaching assistant. And breakout activities can be done online — even for students in the classroom — so that everyone has access to the same materials and can more easily collaborate. But, he acknowledges, faculty members need time and support to think through these approaches. And, most importantly, the technology has to work.
At Northeastern University, which is offering NUFlex, technology is the lynchpin of the enterprise. “This isn’t a pedagogical style,” says David Madigan, the provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. “All it is is technology. It remains as always up to the instructor in the room how to conduct the class.”
Northeastern’s strategy highlights the dramatic difference in investments campuses are making as they move into a hybrid mode. At the University of Nevada at Reno, for example, the campus is spending somewhere around $100,000 — or about $450 per classroom to upgrade about 200 rooms to install cameras that provide a wide-angle shot around the instructor’s lectern, and audio devices that cover an 8- to10-foot radius. It’s too expensive to purchase the kinds of cameras that can zoom in on a whiteboard, says Huffman, so the university is asking faculty members to use document cameras instead. (Huffman notes that most of the classrooms already have a baseline of “smart” technology, including such things as a flat-panel monitor, wireless microphone, and sound system.)
Northeastern, by contrast, is outfitting about 200 classrooms with state-of-the-art technology, a multimillion-dollar investment, says Cole W. Camplese, vice president for information technology and chief information officer. That includes installing cameras at both the front and back of the room that are capable of pivoting and zooming in on people or whiteboards. The university is also placing microphones that hang from the ceiling around the room, installing computers and a sound system, and using web-conferencing technologies to allow students to share screens with one another. (About 100 classrooms already have such technology.)
The university considers these investments part of its long-term strategy around the future of instruction, he says: “This moment is the tipping point where faculty and administrators will understand the power of the hybrid model.”
Through a “dynamic scheduling tool,” NuFlex will also give students the ability to choose week by week whether to attend in person or online, says Camplese. While they won’t have full flexibility, everyone is guaranteed to be able to attend in person at least once each week for each course.
Another complaint about the HyFlex model, nationally, is one that has dogged virtually all colleges that plan to hold face-to-face classes — namely, that asking faculty members to return to campus could place their health at risk.
Madigan called it a “complicated issue,” but said that Northeastern is working on ways to allow faculty members to restrict the amount of time they spend on campus. That may mean they show up for one class and teach another one remotely, with the help of a teaching assistant managing the conferencing technology in the classroom. “We’re trying to work out on a department level what works for people so they can be in class at least some of the time.”
But even that poses too much of a risk, some faculty members say. Somy Kim, an associate teaching professor in the department of English writing program, is helping circulate a petition in which faculty members have asked that they not be compelled to teach in person. It is modeled on a similar faculty-led petition at nearby Boston University, which has announced its own version of HyFlex for the fall, called Learn from Anywhere.
Kim also raised privacy concerns around having cameras in the classroom, an issue that other HyFlex critics have noted as well. “It’s hard enough talking about controversial issues in a classroom,” she said. “Students aren’t going to want to engage in that kind of critical discussion if they know it’s going to be recorded.”
While Northeastern has said that instructors can choose whether or not to record their classes, Kim said that faculty members feel pressured to do so to give students as much choice as possible, should they want to attend asynchronously.
In the end, the debate about HyFlex as a solution to Covid-19 challenges could end up being overtaken by events. As the number of cases continues to grow nationally, more states may ban large gatherings, forcing colleges to move fully online. HyFlex advocates say that the model would easily adapt to those circumstances, since flexibility is at the core of its design. But skeptics will wonder why more colleges didn’t simply choose to go entirely online in the first place.
