Hybrid and Hyflex Collaborations and Teaching

About this session

Date: 22nd May 2024

Presenters: Robert O'Toole

Main follow-up contact: Robert O'Toole

Overview: People are striving to be more inclusive in everything they do together - no one would disagree with a statement like "everyone should be able to access opportunities, regardless of physical, cognitive, social, or economic constraints". And yet the majority of activities still follow patterns set decades, perhaps even centuries ago - at the birth of universities in the medieval era (when we had limited access to texts, no multimedia, no electric light, bandits marauding beyond the college walls). We meet in a physical room, no matter how inconvenient and unsuitable, at a set time, maybe scrawl things on a whiteboard, probably just watch someone read off a Powerpoint, pack up, leave no trace, and repeat until we run out of scheduled sessions. And yet there are whole industries where people never meet up in the same physical space for work. That doesn't mean they sit in darkened rooms isolated from the world 24/7. It can mean they get much more done, so that when they do get together in the same physical location, the time may be used more productively. But there are still powerful social and psychological forces drawing us back to the old habits, especially in post-Covid times. Is there something essential in the non-digital? If so, could it be replicated digitally? Or blended into a good physical-digital mix?

The many mixes of digital and physical we have seen develop, often on an ad hoc. basis, are responses to this. But few common patterns have emerged, and hence successful practice is not spreading effectively. We need to find those patterns and share them.

We will start the session with some technical details about what we can do now (Teams, iPhone as second camera, videoconferencing equipment from AV ServicesLink opens in a new window, RapidMOOC studiosLink opens in a new window) and tools that will transform the possibilities in the next couple of years (including the "metaverse" platforms Meta Horizon WorkroomsLink opens in a new window and Microsoft MeshLink opens in a new window). We need to recognise the importance of audio, and the possibilities of moving back from the screen.

Then we will consider these questions:

1. What might be a good design, mixing digital and physical, for a conference?
2. What might be a good design, mixing digital and physical, for a course?
3. How can we use technologies (now and in the near future) to implement these designs.

We will include definitions of key terms used to classify the organisation of events: co-located (and why "face-to-face" and "in the room" are ceasing to be useful terms), hybrid, hyflex, flipped, synchronous, asynchronous, fluid collaboration, breakouts, side-channels, peer-learning.