Plotless actions with nevertheless a plot: the assemblage of a hybrid learning environment

We report research into the evolvement of a hybrid learning environment where education, companies and government successfully cooperate. This hybrid learning environment—one of the latest inventions in curriculum design—is special because it was neither intended nor planned by the parties involved. With some self-astonishment, the participants in this research experienced a growing acknowledgement of their emerging educational creation, aside from the experience of and appreciation for their cooperation and the increasing turnover. With a bricolage research approach within the scope of a rhizomatic perspective on becoming, a multivocal perspective on the evolvement of the learning environment was pursued. In emphasizing the historical evolvement of the learning environment, our findings challenge the tradition of drawing board design, accompanied by an appeal for re-appreciating professional craftsmanship. In addition, some reflections regarding the research are discussed.

A Multi-Dimensional Hybrid Learning Environment for Business Education: A Knowledge Dynamics Perspective

The main promise of new, digitally enabled and hybrid learning environments is to enable future-ready knowledge workers by equipping them with business and digital competences. However, business education (BE) research often focuses on the problems of instructional design and individual disciplines, rather than on the challenges of developing a holistic knowledge and competences required to ensure students’ long-term employability. This paper, to address this gap, approaches BE as a knowledge dynamics field that consists of rational, emotional and spiritual knowledge and proposes a related framework to serve as a guide for developing and analyzing a hybrid learning environment (HLE) that would support BE. Then, it uses the developed framework in an interview-based study to understand the students’ perceptions of how the implementation of an HLE in postgraduate course stimulated knowledge dynamics for BE. The results show that the HLE stimulated different aspects of knowledge due to the diversity of modes of learning-Face-to-Face (F2F) and online, the diversification of learning sources and the internationalization of the course-level curriculum. These results pave the direction for teachers to use the knowledge framework as a compass for future implementations and evaluations of similar methods.

A Qualitative Study of Faculty Responses to Teaching during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Creating a Culture of Support

This study examines the online teaching and learning experience of twenty-one (21) faculty members at a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) research university from the initial campus closure of the university in February 2020 in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, through the end of Fall 2020 semester. The methodology entailed one-on-one interviews with instructors, reviews of the course materials in the Learning Management System, and the examination of email and videoconferencing exchanges. Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and the Quality Matters Rubric guidelines for instructional design framed the methodology. This study finds that faculty benefitted from close connections with colleagues and continuous institutional support during the pivot to emergency remote teaching and into a hybrid learning environment. These two factors – collegial connections and university resources – were crucial in sustaining faculty work during the period of this study.

USING ACTIVE LEARNING IN HYBRID LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

In this paper, an innovative pedagogical approach relying on flipped classroom and offered in a hybrid learning environment combining on-site and off-site attendees is proposed. The set-up is furthermore tested on two short courses offered at Chalmers University of Technology and analyzed using student course evaluation questionnaires. Several elements constitute the backbone of the courses. Such elements are either offered in an asynchronous fashion or in a synchronous fashion. The asynchronous elements are made of textbooks specifically written for the respective courses, pre-recorded short webcasts explaining the key concepts of the textbooks and on-line quizzes giving formative feedback to the students. Such elements should thus be studied by the students before attending the synchronous sessions. Because of the preparatory work made by the students, the synchronous sessions can focus on much more active forms of learning under the teacher’s supervision. The success of the pedagogical approach entirely depends on the contents of the synchronous sessions, which need to be carefully planned and designed so that they promote student learning. Although the hybrid learning environment gives rise to some additional challenges from a teacher’s perspective, it also gives much more flexibility in attracting students from remote locations, without compromising the learning experience.