Hybrid Learning

As colleges released their plans for the fall semester, even those hoping to reopen their campuses leaned heavily on remote instruction to spread out students and give them more options. 

Under some hybrid models, instructors would teach classes in person and simultaneously livestream those lessons to remote students. Another format is offering a mix of fully in-person or online courses. And others were planning to shift from in-person to virtual classes after Thanksgiving. 

But it can be tough to ensure remote and in-person students get the same quality of education when they take classes together. Here's how several ed tech and higher education experts say colleges can prepare for a hybrid fall. 

Using the right technology

Teaching in-person and remote students in the same class can be tricky, but Harvard University's continuing education division has spent several years reimagining this type of classroom. 

The university used to simply livestream in-person classes to distance students, but this method had some shortcomings. "A livestream was really more of a passive window into the class," said Christian Franco, Harvard's manager of live interactive learning technology. "You're getting the information, but it's not a two-way exchange." 

In 2016, it debuted a new course format called HELIX. There, classrooms are filled with cameras and microphones to capture instructors' lessons, and large monitors display remote students. Although instruction at Harvard will be mostly remote during the fall semester, these courses offer lessons for other colleges employing a similar hybrid model. 

Getting the technology right takes precision. For instance, positioning cameras close to the monitors gives students the sense instructors are looking at them when they view the screens, Franco said.  

Hybrid courses can also require substantial investment. To prepare for the fall term, the University of Kentucky — which is offering a mix of in-person, online and hybrid courses — upgraded technology in roughly 90% of the classrooms listed in its central scheduling system. That includes adding Zoom capabilities to around 120 classrooms with computers or projectors. 

The university also installed panoramic cameras in classrooms for livestreaming, and remote students can use software provided by the school to work in groups during classes, said Kathi Kern, director of the university's center for the enhancement of learning and teaching. 

Students could be in their dorm, in the classroom or on another campus, "but they can still participate with their team," Kern said. "Those teams really allow students to have a lot less anonymity." 

Going beyond technology

Instructors must think carefully about how hybrid classes are structured. "What we quickly realized is that technology alone isn't going to be enough, and you really have to think a lot about the pedagogy," Harvard's Franco said. 

Instructors should be clear with students at the start of the term about how classes will be conducted, he said. Virtual students should know whether they should have their cameras turned on and how to notify the instructor when they have a question. 

"If you just jump in and start going, it's going to take on a life of its own," Franco said. 

Faculty development is also key. The U of Kentucky has been holding virtual office hours since March that allow instructors to consult with pedagogical experts and technology staff. It also created a website that explains how instructors should communicate with their online students. That could include holding virtual office hours regularly and clarifying where students can find lecture materials.  

Students will also need nonacademic support this fall. Old Dominion University, which is offering in-person, online and hybrid courses this fall, is training some staff members whose job duties have been reduced as a result of the pandemic as success coaches and retention specialists. 

The initiative builds on an existing coaching program the university has with InsideTrack, a student services nonprofit. "Some students do very well with the transition online and some don't," said Don Stansberry, the public Virginia university's interim vice president of student engagement and enrollment services. 

Students can talk to coaches either remotely or in person to work through potential issues. For instance, a coach may direct a student who doesn't have the right technology for an online course to the university's emergency grant fund. 

Is hybrid the right approach? 

Several issues may arise with hybrid classrooms, especially when in-person and remote students are tuning into the same lecture. This structure has the potential to make a virtual student feel like a "fly on the wall," said Jesse Stommel, a digital learning fellow and senior lecturer at the University of Mary Washington, a public institution in Virginia. 

Although instructors can use technology to boost remote students' participation, that group's needs may be different from those of in-person students. Online learners, for example, could be more likely to have a chronic illness or be taking care of someone who is sick, Stommel said. 

"The best thing that institutions can do is make sure that they are creating asynchronous opportunities for learning for those students," he said. 

Some institutions that only recently announced their fall plans have given instructors little time to prepare for hybrid courses. And others walked back their plans for an in-person fall as the coronavirus surged throughout many parts of the country. 

"Institutions should have made strong, assertive decisions about what the fall was going to look like so that students and faculty could start planning," Stommel said. "Most institutions have instead waited until the very last minute to decide what the fall was going to look like."

Around 28% of college career services offices as of June were planning for their institutions to have a mix of in-person and online operations in the fall before reopening fully in the spring — up from 22% who said the same in early May, according to a poll of 595 institutions.

With students off campus since March, those offices are relying primarily on email and phone calls to connect with students, and just over half are using virtual drop-in sessions. 

The results came as administrators worked out plans for the fall term. While many said they planned to reopen campuses, those actions hinged on access to testing and approval by state and local governments.

Gathered by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), the data wrapped up a month of weekly surveys about how college career services offices planned to approach the coming academic year. 

The responses suggested more colleges were deciding whether students would be on campus and when and how career services would host recruiting events. However, surveyed schools were still largely uncertain as to how 2020-21 would play out in terms of changes to their budgets, the duration of spending freezes, whether and how campuses would reopen, and if they would change the timing of career fairs.

Colleges faced pressure to reopen their campuses this fall, with a flurry of quick-response surveys suggesting students and their parents weren't happy with remote classes and may not want to continue them into the fall or were otherwise put off college because of the pandemic. Some were even suing their colleges to refund tuition, claiming the online experience is not equivalent to that of campus. Already, schools have returned room and board money and are losing out on other revenue sources because of the closures.

Yet reopening campus was contingent on more than the will of institutions. Testing for the coronavirus is a critical element of reopening plans and widespread access to such tests isn't yet available. Even if campuses did reopen, limitations on how many people can gather in a single space could affect activities.

Several institutions planned to restructure the fall term to allow flexibility for on-campus and remote instruction. While 28% of respondents to NACE's survey said they were planning for their school to be hybrid in the fall and in-person in the spring, around 11% expect to be in-person for the full year. Some 6% were gearing up for a virtual fall and in-person spring. Still, nearly half said they have not decided.

A small share of respondents — about 1% each —​ said their institutions are delaying the start of the fall term until late September or dividing it into two units. 

NACE also polled 335 employers about how the pandemic is affecting their recruiting plans. Four in 10 said they would either maintain their standard recruiting schedule for 2021 graduates, while an equal share said they would wait to see how the situation unfolds.  

Nearly 18% said they would wait to see if their target schools reopen campus before deciding. A smaller share, around 5%, planned to bump fall recruiting activities to the winter or the spring.

For now, college career services offices tell Higher Ed Dive they are helping students adapt to a hamstrung job market. That includes providing simple outreach to let them know the office is available to help.

Southern New Hampshire University made a splash announcing in April that it would give incoming freshmen a year of free tuition and have them take online classes while otherwise participating in campus life.

The change, which is for the online giant's residential program, was designed to blunt the pandemic's economic impact for some students. And it came as many colleges were pressed to weigh similar considerations. But it would also help the university test the waters of a plan to merge in-person and online instruction in a new way.

Paul LeBlanc, the university's president, told Higher Ed Dive that he can't predict just how closely they'll jell the two parts of the university. Southern New Hampshire enrolls more than 130,000 students online, compared to some 3,000 on its campus. 

"In an ideal world, what we imagine is that students would be able to pull from our offerings, no matter where they exist, or in what form, and that would all be integrated in one student information system that would be seamless, it would be sort of one-click," he said.

The university hopes to introduce a variety of online, hybrid and/or project-based programs in the fall of 2021. By that point, it also aims to have reduced tuition for campus programs from $31,000 to $10,000 — a 61% cut that makes the cost equivalent to what online students pay.

But there's still work to be done, LeBlanc said. Higher Ed Dive talked with him after the announcement about the decision, its timing, the place for a residential experience, and what other changes are underway.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.

HIGHER ED DIVE: These are significant changes. Why are you making them now?

LEBLANC: We've known for a long time that higher ed has been increasingly out of reach for a lot of the people we particularly like to serve. Well before the pandemic and the recession, we had set out on a three-year plan with a target of rolling out new programs we could charge only $10,000 a year for. You could still live on campus, you could have the whole coming-of-age experience. But the tuition would be $10,000 as opposed to our current $31,000. That work was in place. Then the pandemic hit and the world turned upside down. 

I remember the 2008-09 recession. I thought that was the darkest year of my 24 years as a president. I think that was a dress rehearsal for what's ahead of us. So I said to our team: seniors in high school don't have the three years to wait for us to roll out new alternatives. We've got to do this soon. We set 2021 as our target. We're not starting at zero and trying to get to 60 miles an hour. We've been playing with these models now for a while with this goal in mind. 

For the students coming in this year, this isn't what they planned on. We're going to give them a 100% tuition scholarship, so it takes all the risk away from them. When they see what we roll out for them in 2021, they can make a decision. They'll take all gen eds in the first year, which are the most transferable of courses.

Is this a whole-school pivot, or is this additive and the original experience will still be available?

LEBLANC: It will be available only for returning students because we have a contractual commitment to continue delivering the program they signed up for. So we will teach out those programs, and then the work of the next year is to see: Is there a version of those programs that we can offer at this more affordable rate? Or do we have to come up with very different programs?

We're trying to unbundle these two jobs we get asked to do. New students will have the clubs, organizations, all of that which we associate with residential campuses. But their academic program will look quite different, and there will be aspects of the residential experience that will likely look different as well. For example, we're looking at a whole new term structure. Should we run our campus 12 months a year? We're looking at everything.

Is classroom-based instruction going to be part of the new model?

LEBLANC: I suspect aspects of that will continue. What we hope to do in September of 2021 is to roll out various options so students can choose the one that's best suited for how they learn. Our preference right now is to try to think about different options for students.

You have a massive online program. How much, historically, have the online and campus-based parts of the university been married? And in what way does this new change bring these two pieces together?

LEBLANC: When I arrived 17 years ago they were wholly integrated. I separated them out and really kept them at a distance because we needed to give online the freedom to do things differently. About three years ago, we started to break down those silos. What we're poised to do will certainly take advantage of a lot of what we've built online. That's only possible because of the work we've done the last three years. I can't pretend that we had the prescience to imagine we'd be facing a pandemic and a recession. But I'm sure glad that we did that work, because we have to build upon that collaborative foundation going forward.

How much of the announcement is about managing freshmen's expectations, so they show up? 

LEBLANC: If the number comes in lower than our typical 1,000 new freshmen, then our conclusion would be, that's okay, this was a tumultuous year, and there's no lost revenue because we already decided they're not going to pay tuition for the first year. And really, the first year is very workable. We have to give them an amazing experience, but we win or lose this bet on fall '21. Are we able to build the kind of programs that allow us to decrease the cost for students down to $10,000 from $31,000?

To what extent did concern over having fewer freshmen commit to attend make your team come up with the announcement for fall 2020? 

LEBLANC: Zero. We have made our classes every year. And we know there's a lot going on, but the minute we decided not to charge tuition, that question goes away. Enrollment is about revenue, right? If we make our numbers for the fall, then we make our budget. 

Right, but if you get those students in for this year, then you get them in for three more years, presumably.

LEBLANC: People did say, look, we need to have some freshman class because we're going to want to test out what this new model looks like for sophomores. We did have the idea of taking nobody for a year, but we wouldn't have a sophomore class and we have this new model we want to run. That was actually more of the driver, wanting to roll out this model.

So would you have done this even if the pandemic hadn't happened, for the freshmen?

LEBLANC: We would have done new models for sure. The original plan was to roll these out in 2023. The recession, more than the pandemic, is really the issue. The pandemic has immediacy and questions of whether campuses will open, etc. But the thing that's going to be devastating for high schoolers is the recession.

We hear schools saying they don't yet know what's going to happen for fall 2020. And we hear from the student perspective, "If there isn't going to be on-campus instruction and that's what I'm paying for, should I wait to see which colleges are going to open?"

LEBLANC: We've been able to say to our students, we have a 95% student satisfaction rating with our online classes. In the event campus doesn't open, you're covered. If we have to do online delivery, they're going to be fine. And when we can open, you'll come in and we'll do this new model.

Do you know yet when campus will officially reopen?

LEBLANC: We don't. We think it's too early. We'll follow science and good public health policy. You can put me in the camp that's skeptical. I think everyone needs to plan to be open. They darn sure better be planning for what happens if they can't. My assumption is that unless there is widespread, reliable testing and contact tracing, it will be very hard for campuses to open and not put people at risk.

If campus stays closed, Southern New Hampshire will reduce tuition to the current online rate of $10,000 a year for all students. Universities are getting lots of pressure around this right now, and your school has a solid online infrastructure to plug those students into. Why are you lowering the rate?

LEBLANC: Let's imagine campuses can't open for the whole year. To stay on pace, students typically would need to complete 10 courses. For us, if you enroll online, those courses are about $1,000 each. There's your $10,000. I don't know what version of taking undergraduates and keeping them fully online justifies me charging them more than I do the 130,000 students who are paying $1,000 a course. It simply reflects what we charge now.

Do you think this can be a reasonable expectation across higher ed?

LEBLANC: What schools can do, what assets they can leverage, what political pressures they face, the strength of their balance sheet — it's all very different, and it's going to influence how they can proceed. The things we can and can't do are going to be very different from the things another institution can or can't do. It's sort of like advising other people on their relationships. Tread carefully. I know our institution, so I know what we can do. But I don't always know very well what others can do.

How ready is the university to cut tuition across the board, from $31,000 to $10,000?

LEBLANC: We have a lot of work to do. We haven't talked about cuts but we have talked about reallocating or moving functions and being able to cut administrative costs, not by getting rid of people but by leveraging where we have more efficient assets. 

An example would be financial aid processing. We process financial aid for 130,000 students online; we do it very well and very fast. We don't think we need to have a separate financial aid processing team for the campus. That's one of the things we'll look at. We may ask students to have different expectations about how administrative work gets done. 

Is there anything else we should know?

LEBLANC: The bigger question we'll face now is will the pandemic, and more importantly, the recession be the kind of forcing factor that drives the kind of structural reform and rethinking of higher ed that's been called for for a long time but that's been very hard to achieve? While this announcement got a lot of attention, I know a lot of my colleagues are thinking very hard about how to reinvent their institutions to be meaningful again in a world that looks very different than it did just three months ago.

The pandemic will hasten a transformation of higher education business models, Moody's Investors Service analysts wrote in an August report.

In particular, the crisis will accelerate many colleges' plans to grow their online footprints, though not all schools have the resources to invest in digital infrastructure, the report notes. They will also likely expand nondegree and certificate programs.

Analysts predict that once the pandemic subsides, some colleges will struggle if they haven't established a strong online presence. 

At least 1,400 colleges moved to mostly online or hybrid instruction for the fall of 2020 as confirmed coronavirus cases spiked in the U.S, according to data kept by the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College. But the pandemic accelerated a shift toward online learning that predates the health crisis, Moody's analysts say. 

"Some universities previously resistant to change will have to take more expansive steps to adapt to this transformation," Pranav Sharma, assistant vice president at Moody's, said in a statement. "Not all universities, however, have the resources or culture to move quickly and the coronavirus will expedite existential threats for some."

Several recent deals by public universities indicate they will continue investing in online education after the pandemic ends, the report states. 

The University of Arizona is setting up a nonprofit entity to acquire Ashford University, a for-profit online college that enrolls around 35,000 students. As part of the arrangement, Ashford's parent company, Zovio, will provide the online college with a range of academic and educational services in exchange for 19.5% of its tuition and fee revenue. 

The U of Arizona said it views the acquisition as a way to reach more nontraditional students, which will be key for schools that expect demographic declines in traditional-age students over the next decade. But faculty have pushed back against the deal, saying that it could damage the university's reputation and hurt Ashford's students. 

The deal is similar to Purdue University's acquisition of for-profit Kaplan University in 2018 to create its online college, Purdue University Global. Although Purdue Global had nearly $400 million in operating revenue in fiscal year 2019, it posted an operating loss of $40 million during its first full year, Moody's analysts wrote. Moreover, Purdue is still working to integrate and manage the two entities' different brands and reputations, they note. 

Likewise, the University of Massachusetts revealed plans in June to partner with the private, nonprofit Brandman University to grow its online presence in the state and nationwide. Details about the arrangement are sparse, though UMass officials said neither the state nor the university would make an upfront investment.

Moody's analysts wrote UMass' partnership differs from the Purdue-Kaplan and U of Arizona-Ashford deals because of Brandman's status as a well-established nonprofit and its "stronger" student outcomes.  

The U.S. Department of Education's new regulations governing distance education could encourage more schools to grow their online presence, the analysts note. 

For instance, the rules give some online vocational and training programs more freedom to use asynchronous education, such as prerecorded lectures. They also could make it easier for some schools to launch competency-based education programs, which are typically online and allow students to move through coursework as they demonstrate mastery of a concept or skills. 

The majority of college faculty members and administrators feel prepared to teach at least some classes online, according to a survey of nearly 900 instructors and administrators conducted in early August.

However, around a third of instructors and a fourth of administrators said they are "pessimistic" about the future of higher education, though they were more optimistic about their roles in the field and their institutions' outlooks.

Faculty and school officials must balance the competing impacts of pandemic-related revenue reductions and the need for investment in online learning. 

Although faculty responding to the survey generally said they felt prepared to teach online this fall, a slightly higher share said so at two-year and private four-year institutions (88%) than at public four-year colleges (81%). Nearly 600 institutions were represented in the survey.

Faculty and administrators across all institution types said they had access to a range of professional development tools for the fall. Both groups rated webinars and self-paced training as the most effective. 

The survey was commissioned by four industry groups and the ed tech company Cengage; it is the second of four assessments designed to get a better sense of colleges' needs in light of the pandemic. The first survey was taken in April and asked college instructors and administrators about the shift to online learning.

College faculty may feel prepared to teach online, but many spent the summer planning for various instructional scenarios. Several schools delayed decisions about how they would start the fall term until a few weeks before it began. Some that opened for in-person learning had to revert to online classes soon after fall classes started because of outbreaks on campus. 

One of the ways colleges attempted to manage the shift was by tasking instructors to prepare to teach the same class simultaneously online and in person. This would allow them to reach individual students who had to quarantine, and to adapt if campuses shut down again. Other schools adopted schedules that had students taking only one or two classes at a time, and many planned to have students leave campus before Thanksgiving break. 

The extent to which colleges can manage campus health and safety with the instructional modes they selected for the fall term will be a major factor in their spring plans, industry experts say. But the shift to online instruction may have longer-term impacts. A recent report from Moody's Investors Service predicted that the pandemic would speed up colleges' plans to expand online.