building instructors' confidence and interest. Although most students want remote attendance options and although many instructors will accommodate their students, instructors may not be interested in teaching courses that are designated as HyFlex. Anecdotally, from conversations with instructors and based on personal experience, teaching two audiences simultaneously is challenging, especially without the sufficient technology. It requires greater cognitive bandwidth to manage two audiences at once, plus the ability to engage with them or facilitate engagement between them. Finally, many instructors do not want to lose in-person engagement, which is what they are most familiar and comfortable with, and some have expressed that they are fearful of a situation in which most of their students move online in a HyFlex format.

greater technological competency than do conventional classrooms and are costly due to additional requisite technologies and programming.

But, let's turn our attention to HyFlex for a moment.

But as we’ve learned through our pandemic experiences,different modalities can be blended together in much richer, theoretically grounded waysthat challenge and expand those frameworks and approaches to teaching

“Professors need to be independent of the AV team. They should be able to walk into aclassroom, connect the technology, and start teaching

Poor deployment or use of any of these or many other elements of hybrid learning technologycan quickly derail the best hybrid learning plans and contribute to suboptimal studentexperiences and outcomes

in practice it’s muchharder than we may give due credit to procure, deploy, and use the basic elements oftechnology needed to facilitate successful and meaningful hybrid learning experiences

HyFlex courses can be deceptively difficult to do well.

A typical HyFlex set-up for lecture classes, in which information flows primarily from the instructor to students, entails two cameras and distributed microphones, as illustrated in Figure 2 and 3. 

For this pilot, we needed students to come to class in order to fully test RLP as a modality. If a student missed class, the absence was treated the same way that absences in residential courses were treated -- students could review the class slides and ask the instructional team questions about the content or borrow notes from a classmate. Live class sessions were recorded, however students were not provided access to the recordings except if an online student experienced technical issues that caused them to miss part of class

The past few months have seen the growing appeal of an evolving system that has various names, including “blended synchronous” learning, “synchromodal” learning and “HyFlex” learning. In this style of learning, instructors blend in-person and online elements, aiming to integrate the best of asynchronous and synchronous instruction. In this format, students who seek an in-person classroom experience interact with remote students who prefer that same real-time experience, but from a distance.

Know your classroom and set-up early

Help students succeed in your version of a hybrid/HyFlex course

but they should be engaging, because this leads to students beingmore motivated to learn and succeed.The possibilities of how students interact with content and with each other are greatly expanded in a hybrid course; just having themread articles online and then meet to discuss themin-class, for example, takes no real advantage of a class format that can otherwise be a transformative experience.

15 Fall Scenarios

HyFlex courses can be deceptively difficult to do well. The technology and the curriculum must align, and the technology needs to work consistently for everyone, which requires testing and possibly new installations or upgrades. The learning must be equivalent for all students, guaranteeing that no student is at a disadvantage due to the learning pathway chosen. Instructors must be comfortable and effective with asynchronous teaching; those who are not can easily underestimate the amount of effort and interaction necessary to engage with online students.

Finally, the best HyFlex classrooms have someone assisting the faculty member.

It’s important to note that the goal of HyFlex is two make both the online and in-person experiences equal.

These assistants could also be work-study students who are assigned a particular classroom (or digital space) or they might be volunteers from class who are given credit for assisting in the delivery of the course.