Redesigning a class for hybrid/hyflex students

How can we best teach a hybrid or HyFlex class?

This week I’m starting my gaming in education seminar and the students are almost exactly balanced between in person and online.  I’ve taught a series of blended classes in Georgetown’s LDT program before, yet wanted to redesign this one with some new ideas and to share my plans here.

First, some general notes, then I’ll dive into my plans for the seminar.

1 Some things I do when teaching hybrid/Hyflex classes

By “hybrid” or “Hyflex” class I’m talking about the general idea of a physical class where in-person and remote learners jointly participate, especially the synchronous or live sessions.  For this post I’m not interested in litigating terminology, nor in talking about the broader issues of supporting hybrid learning. Today I’m focused on a single, practical implementation case.  (If you want to talk HyFlex, let me recommend our two Future Trends Forum sessions with Brian Beatty: 1, 2)

I’ve taught such classes for years in various contexts and with different technologies.  I think the first time was around 1999 when visiting the University of Umea’s Humlab, where I gave a talk to a mixed audience.  Around half were in person and another half appeared through a virtual world (pre-Second Life!). I still remember the disorienting feeling of beholding the two separate audiences in front of me… then a kind of “click” feeling I’ve developed ideas and practices since then.

My basic principle is to support all students, regardless of modality.  I want everyone to feel welcome, supported, and hailed, both through their connection to me as instructor of record, as well as with each other in a budding learning community. Because online learners can feel at a disadvantage, I try to prioritize them with my attention, tending to give them first dibs on various activities. If in-person and online hands go up, online gets priority. It’s a kind of version of the progressive stack practice, but for remote students rather than those marginalized by other factors.

I use technology in a HyFlex setting to maximize the affordances remote learners work with. Our main workhorse software for synchronous meetings is Zoom, so I encourage online students to be creative with their backgrounds and personal presentation, celebrating them.  To the horror of many webinar hosts I insist on keeping the chat function going and engaging with the remote folks that way, creating a kind of backchannel. I also am ready to fire up Zoom rooms when we do small group work.

In terms of pedagogical practices, I often have to decide if I’m going to link remote and in-person learners for a given exercise, or split them by technologies. Sometimes it works better to have a small group with both populations represented, for example, and other times the digital students do well to work together while their face-to-face peers do their own.  In class writing can cross these streams neatly, as when students write to Canvas discussion threads or Google Docs, all equally at home on those web pages.  I always respond verbally to digital writing, and in this kind of class like to lead with the words written by the online team.

I’m a fan of polling throughout my work, and live classes are no exception.  In my LDT seminars I usually poll informally, since these graduate classes tend to be small (under 20 people; this gaming class looks like around 12). I quickly and verbally ask folks if they’re familiar with a certain thing, or take their attitudinal temperature on another topic. I might have them quickly do a chat waterfall response or a brief whiteboard reaction (voting with dots or stickies, say) if I’m concerned that not all students feel they can speak out loud to the point. Again, in the hybrid environment I’ll prioritize remote learners’ reactions.

In each of my classes I begin the semester by asking them what rules or guidelines they’d like to have in general. With a HyFlex class I want students to build out the rules of the road they’d like to have – especially what the online learners would like to maximize their experience and how the in-person students want to best interact with their digitally represented peers.

Now, all of this quickly becomes meta, because LDT students are there precisely to study digital learning, and that’s great. We can connect our practical decisions to their learning, experience, readings, projects, and aspirations.  I plan to foreground this from the first session and return to the theme throughout the semester.

Dave Cormier’s thoughts about teaching Hyflex, captured by Giulia Forsythe on Flickr.

2 How to make a hybrid gaming in education class work

I’m teaching this class in a great room, very large with mobile furniture including rolling tables and whiteboards.  There are three big screens on walls.  Speakers are clear and powerful. Microphones and plentiful.  Bandwidth is solid.  Away from us, remote learners have at least sufficient gear to do the work: computers with audio and video, decent connections. They will Zoom in from various locations, depending on time and their lives: offices, kitchens, airports, cars.

So how do make this work for a class about gaming?  Lectures (always brief) and discussions are taken care of (see above).

Much depends on the kind of game and what’s available.  In some instances, I’m going for what I think of as “1 game, 2 versions.”  That’s when there’s a digital version of the game which is available and easily playable.  For the tabletop game unit we will play classic Eurogame Catan. In-person students will use my cardboard and plastic copy, although one or two might double up (4 players max). At the same time remote students will play the free, online version.  I’d like the latter to play each other, but they might start against the AI.  That way everyone gets a feel for the game.

Similarly, we’ll play a few rounds of The Quiet Year in our introductory class.  This is a map-making game where players represent a community rebuilding after a disaster.  Play takes place on a big sheet of paper.  In the in-person class, I will set out huge rolls of butcher paper, along with multiple pens of various types.  The on-line class will use whiteboard tool Miro, which they’re already familiar with, to draw, sketch, and write. Random events drive the game, which appear in the form of physical cards for the face-to-face crowd.  Online students will randomly pick events from a shared pdf.  1 game, 2 versions. 

In contrast, when we play digital games, everyone can play on an equal footing.  Each student can fire up Seedship or Waterworks from their browser and we discuss over Zoom and in person.  The same pattern follows when we study digital game authoring tools, like Twine.

Role playing games follow a similar pattern, since their composition – people talking and relying on documents – is what we do in class in general.  I’ll try to maximize what each mode affords, even in little ways.  In-person students will create character name and identity cards out of paper, while online students customize their Zoom handles and backgrounds.  This will mean one thing when we do a short, D&D-like fantasy game and something different when we play a Reacting to the Past historical simulation.

Gaming class 2023 with both on-site and remote learners. Note how we pushed the table up to the screen, bringing that student among us.

A different approach is one I haven’t fully planned out yet, which I think of as “same theme, related games.”  That’s when there aren’t digital and analog versions of one game, so I pick two which are closely related.  I’d like to have the in-person students play the climate change game Daybreak, but am not sure of a good digital equivalent for the online students (and am open to suggestions! am trying out Half Earth and Terra Nil).

I’m also going to experiment with hybrid or blended play. We’ll start to look at wargames with the classic Ogre, a science fiction game where a gigantic, autonomous tank fights a swarm of human defenders.  I’m thinking of giving each in-person learner a group of units to organize, as if they are division commanders, then having the on-line students direct the titular Ogre. They can collaborate through Zoom chat and give me their instructions. This *might* work for this particular game, emphasizing the different nature of the two sides.

One hybrid practice I hope to be flexible and improvisational on is students building games and creating gamification plans, which is the climax of the seminar and to which I’ve allocated significant time during the last third of the class.  I hope for students to work with each other, including group projects, but also bouncing ideas off of each other and playtesting. They can make a wide range of games, from tabletop to digital to roleplaying (either a scenario for a preexisting ruleset or creating rules from scratch).

I hope virtual and on-site students can talk with each other and share plans. Physical materials are harder, but have possibilities. Remote learners can send us digital files to print (2d or 3d) for in-person class, and vice versa.  We should also be able to use cameras to share visuals of items and play.

…and that’s where things stand.  Class starts on Tuesday.  I’d like to hear your thoughts, dear readers.

(HyFlex image by Giulia Forsythe)