Give students greater flexibility with HyFlex learning

Students are making a harder choice than they used to. For many, fitting higher education around work, caring responsibilities and rising living costs means deciding, week by week, whether attending campus is realistic. Nearly two-thirds of full-time undergraduates now combine paid work with their studies during term time.

HyFlex (hybrid flexible) learning is one response to that challenge. Rather than asking students to choose between campus-based and online study when they apply, it allows them to decide, week by week, whether to engage in person, online or asynchronously through high-quality online learning materials. Importantly, academic success shouldn’t depend on how students choose to participate.

After six years and more than 200 online and flexible modules, we’ve learned that giving students flexibility is only part of the challenge. The quality of that learning experience is shaped long before teaching begins.

It’s easy to focus on the technology. The harder work lies in the learning design and in the decisions that shape how students experience a module, from the activities themselves to the way the course is organised and resourced. 

Designing different routes through the same module so they offer an equivalent learning experience is where the real work begins.

Plan the workload before you plan the technology

The first design decision is how much development time you are prepared to invest. Creating two genuinely equivalent routes through a module takes considerably more effort than creating one. In our experience, time, rather than technology, is usually the limiting factor.

As a practical planning estimate:

• One hour of tutor-created online content, such as videos, readings or podcasts, takes around six hours to produce. 
• One hour of student activity, including quizzes, discussions and peer review tasks, takes about two hours to design and build.

Those figures also encourage a healthier balance between content and activity. Around 40 per cent content and 60 per cent activity for directed learning has proved a useful target, giving students more opportunities to apply ideas while keeping development effort realistic.

When time is tight, the online route often feels it first. It’s much harder to create an equivalent learning experience once those compromises have been made.

Offer only the learning modes you can support well

Brian Beatty’s original HyFlex model, which underpins much of the current thinking around HyFlex design, includes three ways for students to participate: in person, synchronously online and asynchronously online.

The synchronous online route is often the most demanding because it asks teaching staff to deliver two learning experiences simultaneously. Supporting students in the room while enabling meaningful participation online requires careful planning, appropriate technology and, ideally, dedicated in-room support. Without that, remote students can quickly become observers rather than participants, making parity difficult to achieve.

For us, that meant focusing on in-person and asynchronous learning, where we could invest in creating two genuinely equivalent experiences rather than spreading effort across three.

• Synchronous or asynchronous? When to use which when teaching online
• Strategies to motivate students in asynchronous learning
• We need to move beyond the synchronous versus asynchronous debate

Design around how online students learn

Students studying independently engage differently from students in a classroom. They work at their own pace, need more frequent opportunities to check their understanding, and need to be able to pick up where they left off easily.

Design the online route around those behaviours rather than around classroom teaching.

Those behaviours call for different design choices. Short videos recorded directly to camera, each focused on a single concept, work well alongside automated knowledge checks and structured learning activities. In our modules, videos were typically limited to 10 minutes before students were asked to apply or test what they had just learned.

The objective isn’t to recreate the classroom. It’s to achieve the same learning outcomes through a format designed for independent study.

It is also easy, when designing two parallel routes, to forget that online students need deliberate opportunities to feel connected. In our experience, this is one of the most common gaps in online learning design. Discussion activities, collaborative tasks and regular tutor communication should be built into the online route from the outset, not added as an afterthought. Connection must be designed in.

One student studying a statistics module described the ability to pause, rewind and revisit demonstrations as giving them “the belief that I am OK to do statistics by myself”.

Create a predictable learning experience

Students should spend their time learning, not working out where they need to click next.

A consistent weekly structure helps students build familiarity quickly and reduces unnecessary cognitive load. Clearly separating in-person and online materials, using consistent labels and indicating estimated completion times all make it easier for students to organise their study around work and other commitments.

Where students can move between learning modes each week, build a simple mechanism for them to indicate how they intend to participate. In our modules, we used the quizzing tool in our virtual learning environment to ask students a single question about how they planned to engage that week. Their response triggered a release condition that unlocked the relevant learning materials. We didn’t need any additional technology, but we did need to work closely with our timetabling team so rooms could be allocated dynamically. Without that, we risked booking teaching spaces that sat empty when students chose to participate online. 

It’s important to have those conversations early. This approach helps teaching staff anticipate attendance while encouraging students to make a deliberate choice about how they will engage with the module that week.

In a classroom, tutors can often spot disengagement immediately. Online, those signs are less visible, so they need to be designed for.

Learning analytics, progress dashboards, short knowledge checks and automated reminders make it easier to identify students who are beginning to fall behind before small issues become significant ones. They also reduce the amount of manual follow-up required from teaching teams.

Applying these principles has allowed us to give students greater flexibility without compromising outcomes.

Students should choose how they learn based on what works for them, not on which route offers the better educational experience. When modules are designed for parity, flexibility becomes a benefit, not a compromise.

Stuart Samuels is the flexible learning manager at Nottingham Trent University. 

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