The OfS blended learning report: meeting the challenge

Is now the perfect time to reimagine the student experience in higher education?

This week the Office for Students published its Blended Learning Review, which is significant for higher education strategy in the UK. University leadership teams in the UK are seeking to respond to the findings and recommendations of this report. Key points that jump out of this report include the following:

• The reasons behind blended learning provision should be more clearly communicated to students.
• Quality and pedagogy must drive decisions around the design of that experience.
• The learning experience should be more coherent for students.
• The diverse needs of students must be more carefully considered.

At the same moment, universities worldwide are still weighing the impact of the global pandemic on higher education. One long-term change appears to be the adoption of blended learning as a ‘new normal’, as universities make the most of the experience gained from the rapid shift to online learning.  Yet there are many unanswered questions as we move out of crisis mode and into a new and more uncertain future.

In this article, we consider how universities can approach some of the challenges they now face, including those relating to student engagement, increased expectations of online learning, and how they can begin to implement a plan to reimagine their distinctive ‘new normal’.

Blended learning as the new normal 

Let’s dig a little deeper by unpacking ‘blended learning’.  You will find a lot of disagreement on definitions, but this term (sometimes used as a synonym for ‘hybrid learning’) usually refers to offering a mix of alternate modalities for most students on a given course. Usually, this includes face-to-face experiences combined with online ones – synchronous (like a Zoom meeting) and/or asynchronous (like readings or videos). Nominally, the whole cohort has a similar set of experiences, resources and support. One may say that hybrid learning was already the accepted student experience prior to the pandemic, although it would be much harder to argue that it was as fully entrenched as it is now.

Hyflex gives learners choices

Since at least the mid 00s we have heard the call for a more ambitious level of flexibility. Beatty’s (2007) highly influential paper coined the term “hyflex” by combining hybrid learning with flexible participation. A central principle of hyflex is that students make choices about their preferred experience.  They could be logged into a class in real time, or they could watch a video instead, for example, and their experience in each mode should be designed to be equivalent. I highly recommend referring to Irvine’s (2020) excellent description of ‘merging modalities’ if you are keen to learn more about accepted distinctions between terms like hybrid and hyflex.

Streaming to the rescue?

Blended synchronous learning has been widely used as a form of hyflex learning aiming to provide greater flexibility within a given cohort, even though it arguably fails to meet Beatty’s definition as it still requires students to participate in real time. Typically, some students attend classes in person while some are keeping up at home (“real time remote”). This happened a lot during the pandemic and a drawback is that students and teachers often complain that it is the worst of both worlds.  Evaluations of blended synchronous learning put in place over the pandemic (such as Detyna et. al, 2021) are showing that cognitive load and social presence remain major challenges.  Taking a learning experience design view on this, trying to cater for students with significantly different experiences together in one class is difficult.  As anyone who has taken part in an online meeting that has one or more groups of people together in a room, keeping control over the audio is tricky at best.  Kitting out classrooms with expensive audio equipment like beam-focusing microphones does not get around the problem that it can be a technical and logistical mess that is generally to be avoided if possible. Our usual advice in this situation is to focus on providing students with a first class on campus or online experience rather than compromising both by forcing them into one cohort.  

Online learners want flexibility as well as connection

While the trend towards online was already underway prior to the pandemic, most higher education students still wish to study on campus.  For the minority who do choose a fully online experience, it is not surprising that they generally prefer to be able to time-shift by completing most of their work in an asynchronous mode. After all, let’s remind ourselves why on demand TV is winning over live TV.  The point is really all about being able to fit the experience around your complex, messy life.  Blended-synchronous approaches are just not suited to fully online learners. This is one reason many university leadership teams are considering making a better long-term plan.

The flexibility offered by a mainly asynchronous experience is not the entire picture however, as recent results from Wiley’s ‘Voice of the Online Learner’ (2022) report shows.  This large post-pandemic survey of US students shows that while online learners certainly want flexibility, they also want to connect with their peers in real time. Thus while online learners generally prefer asynchronous formats (69%) and fully remote (79%) participation options, most would prefer the inclusion of some level of synchronous online learning (79%) as part of the picture.  As Phil Hill (The Synchronous Opportunity, September 13) points out, this appears to be a significant upwards trend from previous surveys and bears noting.