Which do you think would be better for students: hybrid (ie, flipped) or HyFlex?

[Aster]

The community college I teach at has still not announced any fall plans (though the dept chair thinks that things will be mostly online). I wonder whether many CCs don't have the same worries about trying to attract students, and their worries may indeed about having too many students given the massive unemployment numbers. If so, then they don't need to try to lure students in with promises of face-to-face classes.

Yes and no.

Many students take classes because they want to meet new people and enjoy engaging with other students. If they don't believe they are learning anything, or don't perceive time value in their online classes, or are concerned about transfer, they will probably just take a gap year.

That sounds plausible. But then that could be welcome at least for CCs that are worried about becoming overloaded with students.

Didn't most CCs get a lot of new students in 2008/2009 during the recession and class sizes went up considerably? It was a problem for the CCs then. (But my memory of the details is hazy.)

Yes. Community colleges usually do very well in recessions.

The general "model" for open enrollment institutions (especially inexpensive ones) is that when the economy is good, student enrollments are down. And when the economy is bad, enrollments are good. The pattern is weaker but still usually detectable at R2's and slightly more selective institutions, most particularly in high-demand (e.g. accounting) or easier (business) graduate programs.

[nescafe]

Hybrid with asynchronized lectures is the clear choice here. Pedagogically, it's the better way. From a public health perspective, it's also the only way if you ask me.

I actually taught in a very "HyFlex" way at my first job, with one key distinction: half of my class was live in person with me, and the other half was watching live through a closed-circuit television rigging and had mics so they could ask questions, etc. It was a nightmare for all the reasons described in this thread and more.

1. as said upthread, the students who were not in the room were at a clear disadvantage re: engagement. Most of them were zoned out, and even though my lectures were successful for in-the-classroom learning, they tended to totally flop for distance learners. The HyFlex model rotates the cohorts, so in theory that spreads the pain around, but the reality is that means each student will get 1/3 to 1/2 of a real, in-person course.

2. live classes with an seminar-style, Socratic, project-based components, or non-lecture delivery format don't work all that well with this model, either. This is also connected to the issue that you cannot really check in on the distance learners the same way.

3. going with hyflex in our current circumstance means retooling one's course twice: once now (to make two versions of the course to satisfy the students in both groups), and again when the campus shuts down in a likely second spike. Going hybrid now means that, in person or online, the format remains basically the same.

I could go on, but I guess the tl:dr is I find HyFlex a pedagogically repressive format, because it really assumes class looks like passive learners engaged in content consumption. And really, why on earth put everyone at risk for what is (for most, perhaps not all faculty) an inferior instructional mode?

[ciao_yall]

The community college I teach at has still not announced any fall plans (though the dept chair thinks that things will be mostly online). I wonder whether many CCs don't have the same worries about trying to attract students, and their worries may indeed about having too many students given the massive unemployment numbers. If so, then they don't need to try to lure students in with promises of face-to-face classes.

Yes and no.

Many students take classes because they want to meet new people and enjoy engaging with other students. If they don't believe they are learning anything, or don't perceive time value in their online classes, or are concerned about transfer, they will probably just take a gap year.

That sounds plausible. But then that could be welcome at least for CCs that are worried about becoming overloaded with students.

Didn't most CCs get a lot of new students in 2008/2009 during the recession and class sizes went up considerably? It was a problem for the CCs then. (But my memory of the details is hazy.)

Yes. Community colleges usually do very well in recessions.

The general "model" for open enrollment institutions (especially inexpensive ones) is that when the economy is good, student enrollments are down. And when the economy is bad, enrollments are good. The pattern is weaker but still usually detectable at R2's and slightly more selective institutions, most particularly in high-demand (e.g. accounting) or easier (business) graduate programs.

Yes, CC's were booming back then. However, the classes were pretty much all F2F, with some online options. That's different from all classes being 100% online.

Not sure how students will react.

[Aster]

The community college I teach at has still not announced any fall plans (though the dept chair thinks that things will be mostly online). I wonder whether many CCs don't have the same worries about trying to attract students, and their worries may indeed about having too many students given the massive unemployment numbers. If so, then they don't need to try to lure students in with promises of face-to-face classes.

Yes and no.

Many students take classes because they want to meet new people and enjoy engaging with other students. If they don't believe they are learning anything, or don't perceive time value in their online classes, or are concerned about transfer, they will probably just take a gap year.

That sounds plausible. But then that could be welcome at least for CCs that are worried about becoming overloaded with students.

Didn't most CCs get a lot of new students in 2008/2009 during the recession and class sizes went up considerably? It was a problem for the CCs then. (But my memory of the details is hazy.)

Yes. Community colleges usually do very well in recessions.

The general "model" for open enrollment institutions (especially inexpensive ones) is that when the economy is good, student enrollments are down. And when the economy is bad, enrollments are good. The pattern is weaker but still usually detectable at R2's and slightly more selective institutions, most particularly in high-demand (e.g. accounting) or easier (business) graduate programs.

Yes, CC's were booming back then. However, the classes were pretty much all F2F, with some online options. That's different from all classes being 100% online.

Not sure how students will react.

Oh, I'm pretty confident in predicting strong Fall enrollments. Community colleges will come out on top with the healthiest enrollments (compared to other institutional types). Being less or more online won't matter. They'll still be the cheapest and easiest way to go to college, and those two factors will dominate prospective students' choices. Anyone with a credit card and a heartbeat can just walk into any community college and sign up for classes. No selective institution can match that.

Big Urban was roughly 40% online 15 years ago, and is still (pre-covid) roughly 40% online. We really can't or should go any higher than 40%, because some courses simply can't be converted into online formats (e.g. chemistry lab), and part of the community college mission mission obligates that students should get roughly as much access to traditional instructional formats as they would to online formats. So the adoption of the tech's  been implemented for well over a decade, and many community colleges hit "maximum appropriate online" back then. I've visited several community colleges in different states in the late 2000's, and the ratio of online:F2F was similar to ours (or slightly higher) back then.

The online courses mostly fill up first, because online=convenient. The traditional-format classes fill up slower, but they do fill up unless they are truly terrible timeslots (e.g. 8am classes, weekend classes). There are some students that do prefer one type of instructional format if given the choice. That choice difference however doesn't tend to matter so much to most community college students, because tuition is just so crazy cheap. That cheapness creates something akin to a disposo-culture. Students tend to be more daring (or less caring) with course choices and course formats when a 3-credit class costs less than $400.

[apl68]

Since community college students are after a credential, not a "college experience," I would assume that they would be less upset about having to go online.

[ciao_yall]

Since community college students are after a credential, not a "college experience," I would assume that they would be less upset about having to go online.

Yet these are the students who tend to have the least access to broadband and a home computer, and the most likely to fail an online class.

They also have the most need for role models in the norms and dispositions in the professional environment.

[aside]

Yes, the messaging at places "committed" to in-person classes in the fall smacks of bait and switch.

I'd like to think that the plan is not to bait and switch.  But if many schools end up suddenly switching to online in the fall, it's going to be functionally the same.  And the students are certainly going to feel baited-and-switched.

I mean the simple fact is that nobody knows what the situation is going to be in the fall. You can't plan for online and then switch to face to face. Colleges aren't designed to be totally online and the quality and level of instruction just isn't going to be the same. Of course enrollment comes into the desire to announce you're planning to be in person, but I don't really think it is some clever bait and switch plan. The situation presents a lot of very difficult choices that have to be made in the face of incomplete information.

Yes, of course, difficult choices have to be made in the face of incomplete information.  My point was about the messaging at places "committed" to in-person classes in the face of this very uncertainty about the safety and feasibility of in-person classes.  The motivation behind this messaging rests on financial concerns, not concerns about the health and well-being of students, staff, and faculty:  the financial concerns indeed concern enrollment, as university administrations fear students will opt for a gap year or attend community colleges rather than pay full university tuition for some combination of online, hybrid, and in-person classes (as others on this thread are discussing).  My own well-respected institution has been trumpeting its commitment to in-person classes despite the fact that the reduced class sizes necessitated by social distancing (six feet between students) would make it impossible to offer all of our classes in-person, and the fact that many faculty are of an age that would place them in a high-risk category and thus qualify them for an accommodation for online teaching.  Thus, after all of this messaging about commitment to in-person classes, my institution has now had to announce that a certain percentage of classes will be held online or as hybrid online/in-person, with students in a hybrid section attending only 1/3 to 1/2 of class sessions in person.  Students and parents are quite understandably feeling they have been misled, and many have claimed "bait-and-switch" tactics have been employed.  My institution is far from being alone in this situation.

[Aster]

Yes, the messaging at places "committed" to in-person classes in the fall smacks of bait and switch.

I'd like to think that the plan is not to bait and switch.  But if many schools end up suddenly switching to online in the fall, it's going to be functionally the same.  And the students are certainly going to feel baited-and-switched.

I mean the simple fact is that nobody knows what the situation is going to be in the fall. You can't plan for online and then switch to face to face. Colleges aren't designed to be totally online and the quality and level of instruction just isn't going to be the same. Of course enrollment comes into the desire to announce you're planning to be in person, but I don't really think it is some clever bait and switch plan. The situation presents a lot of very difficult choices that have to be made in the face of incomplete information.

Yes, of course, difficult choices have to be made in the face of incomplete information.  My point was about the messaging at places "committed" to in-person classes in the face of this very uncertainty about the safety and feasibility of in-person classes.  The motivation behind this messaging rests on financial concerns, not concerns about the health and well-being of students, staff, and faculty:  the financial concerns indeed concern enrollment, as university administrations fear students will opt for a gap year or attend community colleges rather than pay full university tuition for some combination of online, hybrid, and in-person classes (as others on this thread are discussing).  My own well-respected institution has been trumpeting its commitment to in-person classes despite the fact that the reduced class sizes necessitated by social distancing (six feet between students) would make it impossible to offer all of our classes in-person, and the fact that many faculty are of an age that would place them in a high-risk category and thus qualify them for an accommodation for online teaching.  Thus, after all of this messaging about commitment to in-person classes, my institution has now had to announce that a certain percentage of classes will be held online or as hybrid online/in-person, with students in a hybrid section attending only 1/3 to 1/2 of class sessions in person.  Students and parents are quite understandably feeling they have been misled, and many have claimed "bait-and-switch" tactics have been employed.  My institution is far from being alone in this situation.

Yes. This is exactly it. Thank you for summing this up.