Hybrid flexible (HyFlex) teaching and learning: climbing the mountain of implementation challenges for synchronous online and face-to-face seminars during a pandemic.

In 2020, King's College London introduced HyFlex teaching as a means to supplement online and face-to-face teaching and to respond to Covid-19 restrictions. This enabled teaching to a mixed cohort of students (both online and on campus). This article provides an outline of how such an approach was conceptualized and implemented in a higher-education institution during an intense three-month period over that summer and prior to the limited re-opening of the university campus. This was a new approach that offers a number of pointers for reflection and provides key insights in on this novel learning environment and the physical and pedagogical contexts in which learning can occur. Technical implementation factors are detailed, along with both reflections on challenges and solutions. Pedagogical issues such as cognitive load, social presence, and resolving the issues of a cohort spread across two locations are discussed. While we should be mindful of the limitations of this relatively-specific research, and shouldn't therefore over-extrapolate our findings, one key finding is that delivering Hyflex is associated with a higher cognitive load. Further, the audio quality of our implementation enhanced the feeling of presence in the learning environment. We recommend providing appropriate technical and pedagogical training, as well as audio-visual and digital education support.

Hybrid flexible (HyFlex) seminar delivery – A technical overview of the implementation

This paper investigates a new technology for Hybrid flexible delivery (known as HyFlex), as implemented at King's College London. The relatively novel character of HyFlex, of mixing synchronously on-line and in-room teaching, and the recent changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic mean this use of the technology and teaching model is largely new to the UK. This research evaluated audio quality in the context of a HyFlex technical environment. The paper provides a high-level overview of the process of designing a HyFlex solution and presents a detailed evaluation of the impact of reverberation in relation to the accuracy of automatically generated subtitles and the influence of microphone selection. The paper shows that there was a significant relationship between the reverberation, the audio quality, and the subtitling system, which is important as past studies highlighted audio quality is key for the students' experience. It presents a viable and simple methodology to estimate the audio quality on installed HyFlex systems to improve the students experience in a hybrid teaching environment.