Hybrid Teaching

At Leuphana, hybrid teaching means synchronous teaching with participants on site and participants connected online. This means that some of the students are on campus and participate in the course, while others are present via a meeting room, e.g. via the Zoom video conferencing service. This results in a variety of interaction opportunities that may vary depending on the course and didactic setting.

The subpages on Interaction Methods and on Technical Aspects provide further important information for the implementation of hybrid teaching.

Good luck!

Interaction in Hybrid Teaching

In the conception and implementation of your hybrid teaching, you can make a variety of didactic decisions. These also depend on the learning objectives and the framework conditions, such as the type of your course.

If you want to get your students talking to each other to a large extent, which will often be the case in seminars or exercises, you will need other technical resources and didactic methods to support you (see graphic below on the right side and ideas for interaction methods). If you are primarily interested in allowing online participants to participate receptively, a camera perspective on you as the teacher is usually sufficient, possibly with a student-supported backchannel via chat (see graphic below on the left side).

With streaming there is hardly any interaction, online participants can communicate via the backchannel, if online participants switch on their camera and microphone, further interaction possibilities are also conceivable. Group homogeneous and group heterogeneous groups require further considerations. ©CC BY SA 4.0 Gurr/Trostorff 2021 - Interaction in Hybrid Teaching: Degrees of Interaction
The diagram shows the different degrees of interaction depending on the course type and names requirements.

Conditions for Success

Didactically:

  • Adapt your teaching strategy, hybrid teaching is a format of its own.
  • Explain your didactic design to the students.
  • Support by students or student assistants is very helpful.

Technically:

  • Pay attention to the sound quality!
  • Online participants should have their microphones switched off when they are not speaking.
  • You have more creative possibilities in your teaching if all students have an internet-capable device at their disposal (for collaborative synchronous work, instant feedback with classroom response systems, interaction across groups).

Ressources

Feedback

For regular feedback you can schedule time in or after each session. What went well? Where do you see room for improvement? What is missing and how can the participants support good teaching and learning even better?

In addition, as every semester, you can use the qualitative feedback format Shift! and course evaluation, both of which are also highly recommended for hybrid event formats.