Hybrid Learning

As schools attempt to open back up this fall, one strategy to get kids back on campus is to conduct hybrid learning, during which students spend a portion of time on campus and another chunk of time at home using remote learning technology. Hybrid learning is a compromise, as the name implies, to get students back to a partial sense of normalcy on campus while also recognizing that some subjects are ideally suited to teaching online. The goal is to minimize student interaction, or the interaction between groups, and thereby reduce community spread of COVID-19.

Hybrid learning is evolving as a flexible idea with no specific or rigid model in place. Some schools try to set up a roughly 50/50 system with students being at school only 50% of the time, but every school is different. Sometimes a single course works well entirely online or entirely in person, but in other cases a course may be broken down into two components, one better suited for classroom instruction and one for online instruction. A common strategy is to reduce the number of students physically meeting in-person at school, which can be accomplished in many ways, such as scheduling cohorts of students to attend school at alternating times of day or days of the week.

In some instances of hybrid learning, students aren’t going to their schools at all but meeting in some other location that allows face-to-face instruction without sacrificing social distancing guidelines for that city and state. Education pundit Jesse Stommel suggests that the place-based component of hybrid learning “doesn’t have to be a classroom. The students can do work on their own ‘in the field’ at a safe distance and asynchronously. Their attendance can be ‘required’ and also self-reported. This is an ‘in-person’ class.” Stommel is a Digital Learning Fellow and Senior Lecturer of Digital Studies at University of Mary Washington.