Dual Mode Teaching

I did a five minute presentation to RUGIT on dual model teaching.

Zoom
Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

Should we be doing dual-mode or hybrid teaching? Well there’s a question I get asked quite a lot these days by colleagues across the higher education sector.

Firstly, what is it? Well Durham has a nice definition.

At its best, dual-mode teaching combines the face-to-face and online experience into one cohesive whole. It keeps the class together, providing a shared learning experience that works for students who are on campus and those joining remotely at the same time. It allows you to include and draw on the full diversity of your students and their experiences to date.

They add though

The challenge is to provide an equitable experience, to engage with the people in the room and those joining remotely, using spaces and technologies that were not designed for this.

Generally from what I have researched in this space (and this is backed up by the research we have done with universities in the ) is that basically it doesn’t really work.

UCL for example say

‘Dual-mode’ teaching is where students are taught face-to-face in a classroom and online simultaneously. We strongly recommend this be avoided unless pedagogically appropriate for both groups and adequate staffing is in place to manage and integrate remote students into sessions fully. 

There are individuals who say that they can do this, but not really seeing the evidence from the students that it is effective. It does require more resource (staff and technology) which makes it more expensive, but still unsatisfying for both the in-person and the online students.

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