Surely, one day, the current COVID 19 crisis will be ended. Our educational institutions will reopen, and all student-teachers will celebrate their get-together on campus. But if the period of crisis is prolonged, what will be the future of the lives of our students? The truth is, time does not stop, so what steps are we expected to take to keep the education system normal? Since we do not know when the present crisis will leave us, for the betterment of the student's academic life, we must keep in mind the sustainability of the educational organizations.
It has already been shown in this pandemic situation that higher education may continue online practices effectively. Consequently, the transition will take place ina technology-supported system like online and blended education. After the crisis began, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, even some of Bangladesh's private universities have made their education activities online. To make this approach more effective, it is more important to choose a technique that might be the best face-to-face alternative. The hybrid teaching and learning model, we believe, could be adopted by educational institutions to encourage students among stakeholders, and would be the best alternative. Several recent statistics and studies have shown that online learning will continue to be incorporated into higher education, especially the hybrid teaching and learning model. Considering these deliberations, the education stakeholders may need to adopt various strategies to fulfill the demand of this Hybrid Learning Model (HLM).
As we know, the HLM offers an opportunity for live delivery of instructions and interactions among the teachers and students and the students themselves. Simultaneously, it makes very easy and accessible for the remote students to approach the course and join the peer groups for their learning by this novel technological infrastructure. As defined by Doering in his works 'Adventure learning: Transformative hybrid online education', "Hybrid Learning refers to the mixing of the learning environments: face-to-face classroom instruction and online environment". Similarly, Hentea, Shea, & Pennington stated as "The concept of Hybrid Learning refers to the combination of an online learning environment by gaining the flexibility of distance or outside of classroom learning, and a face-to-face classroom instruction".So, the core concept of hybrid learning is essentially simple but accepted universally by the academic communities globally. Moreover, this educational model provides the students with an opportunity to attend the class in-person, while others remotely located can join the class from home. At the same time, educators teach remote and in-person learners using these tools such as hardware and software video conferencing, and so on.
The great advantages of this HLM are flexibility, interactivity, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. It is a way to combine traditional classroom environments, experiential learning objectives, and interactive delivery of courses that prioritize the best option for each learning objective. Another substantial benefit is that students can work at their speed and have affordability, especially in our current situation. And, of course, it enables social distancing, but still offers the social communication that students in the present time desperately need. A hybrid class requires, clearly, more planning than a conventional program. A successful modeling course approach requires also like defining targets, mapping the synchronous and asynchronous components, making a timetable, and rationally producing the relevant online content before the beginning of the semester or classes.
By following this model, students can be followed the meaningful alternative content and activities to participate, practice, and be assessed; can get lectures, textbooks, and other related courses materials for completion of the enrolled courses; students can re-watch recorded video or audio lectures, spend more time on practice, re-read peer discussion comments, and take the time they need to complete assignments within the given timeframe. Along with these possibilities, when working and writing online, students have more time to think about than they do in the traditional model.
Similarly, the level of online practices enriches more than face-to-face experiences. Hopefully, the teaching communities will re-use the online content and resources as learning objects, problem-solving, performance-based demonstrations, individual presentations, and coaching. Within the plethora of opportunities, a big potential drawback of doing a hybrid learning model is it can be boring for students if it's done wrongly. Unless teachers can relax into allowing students to drive their learning.
While the idea of HLM may be new to students, parents, educators, and stakeholders, it has been used for quite some time in educational communities. The fact is that it is an approach to education that combines online learning with more traditional real-life classroom experience. We need to have the matter in our mind that epidemic creates a lot of troubles; it also creates many opportunities to overcome the barriers. It is notably important to maximize the capacity of the stakeholders by addressing the existing limitations by improving the relevant strategies. For that, the HLM can currently be a successful alternative initiative. Teachers, students, parents, and educationists should come forward along with the government to integrate this approach into the best solution during and after the Corona Pandemic. Finally, changing the reactive mindset and positive attitude towards this system may open a new horizon as an effective alternative to the uncertain journey of the education system.
Md Fouad Hossain Sarker is the Head & Assistant Professor and Faisal Akber is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Development Studies at Daffodil International University.
