Hybrid teaching, as well as regular contact teaching, has its own challenges. Among teachers, hybrid teaching strongly divides opinions, some find it really challenging, while others see it as a versatile method that takes different students and learners into account.
When talking about challenges, it is important to remember that most challenges can be overcome or at least reduced. If the challenges are known in advance, they can be solved with good planning. If the challenges are not yet known, new methods can first be piloted to point out potential challenges.
It is a well-known fact that hybrid teaching, especially in the beginning, requires a bit more planning than traditional classroom teaching. Let’s approach this transformation of traditional classroom teaching into hybrid teaching through a case study.
Case Study: A Day of Hybrid Teaching for Business Students
Tampere Adult Education Centre has a teaching day for business students called: ”Getting to know the retail sector”. The day consists of a theoretical part and a group part where students go in small groups to visit the stores in a nearby shopping centre. In the stores, by interviewing and observing, they get information about the salaries, holidays, and various tasks in the industry. After the visits, the students return to class and present their observations to the teacher and other groups. The teaching day has been well liked and the students have gained a lot of new information about the retail sector and its opportunities.
This particular teaching day was piloted as part of the HAVE project as a hybrid implementation. The conversion of the theory part from classroom teaching to hybrid was still easy to implement by using Teams and the Owl conference camera. The challenge was identified as the familiarisation task described above. It was known that some of the students are in class and some remotely in different parts of Finland. How could the same task be carried out so that everyone would learn a lot about the retail sector and get to present their observations to each other? For those in the class, it was decided to organize an exercise with the original model. Those involved remotely were given two alternative ways to do the task. If there was a retail company near them, they could leave their home, for example, to visit their local store. If the student did not have the opportunity to visit a nearby company, they would do an information search assignment in which they would search the websites of companies and social media for the same things.
The teaching day was carried out according to the plan, and when the students returned to class, each group and student were able to present their observations to others. The performances were carried out alternately so that first a small group that visited the shopping centre was presented, then a student who was online, and then again a small group that visited the shopping centre, and so on.
Hybrid teaching offers new learning experiences
The aim was to strengthen the sense of belonging as part of learning. The issues raised in the presentation were much more diverse than in traditional teaching, as the students participating remotely had searched for information about more different companies than the groups that visited the shopping centre.
It is important to remember that successful teaching often requires planning and practice. Hybrid teaching offers a versatile and flexible way of learning if you put effort into the planning and piloting.
Henri Halmela
Writer works at TAKK as a teacher in business and economy.
