While I’m not proud to admit it, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought teaching remotely would be a dream come true. It wasn’t that I didn't value, cherish and miss the face-to-face interactions I had with my students, but because I naively assumed that my more reluctant colleagues would see the light and finally embrace edtech. As a techie at heart, I envisioned a digital utopia where post-pandemic schools would become fully digitized with students and teachers always remote and online while still preserving the magic of human interaction.

But when I looked over my classes after returning to in-person instruction, I had the sinking feeling that I had exchanged the traditional model of student instruction with individual seats in rows and columns for a replica with devices instead. Are we just educational luddites or has the edtech revolution fallen short of its promises? As educators, we need to be more discerning and discriminating about the use of technology in our classrooms and be willing to admit when the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.

The Hype Has Left the Building

The tech landscape at my school was far from unique before the pandemic. Between early adopters and strident naysayers, most teachers fell in the middle. Google classrooms were rarely used, and laptops, while ubiquitous, were primarily used during standardized testing season. The landscape seemed ripe for a tech revolution but it never gained the critical mass needed to be realized.

While I thought the integration of new tech at my school would be a good thing, it turned out to be mediocre, at best. Working from home on a subpar laptop, most of my time was spent waiting for things to load. Even the best tech couldn't drown out the sounds and distractions from neighbors in my building who were also forced to shelter in place and work from home. A dropped Internet connection – a minor annoyance in the best of times – became the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Ironically, though, it was the lack of human interaction that became the central issue. Chat messages were not able to mimic lively in-person exchanges between students, shared documents couldn’t replace collaboration in real-time, and a collage of student avatars was certainly no substitute for seeing students face-to-face — even in the rare instances when they would choose to turn on their device cameras. When tech adoption was voluntary, these shortcomings could be mitigated by using technology to enhance rather than replace human-centric teaching. When there was no alternative to making it the centerpiece, its deficiencies became impossible to work around.

Being a computer science teacher, I thought I had a natural affinity for technology that could translate into a successful tech-agnostic approach to curriculum and instruction; however, by Thanksgiving of the following year, I had led one too many uninspiring and demoralizing online classes where it felt like I was talking into a deep, dark void. Swapping stories with fellow teachers over the past year, it is apparent that these experiences are nearly universal. As the medium and the messenger, technology became the scapegoat for all the frustration and discouragement teachers and students felt at that time, including myself. Ultimately, when put to the test, the edtech boom in 2020 fell far short of its hype.

The Exhaustion Lingers On

The lingering fatigue many teachers and students are experiencing with edtech is real, and in hindsight, completely predictable. Lockdowns and hybrid classes during the pandemic gave edtech companies a golden opportunity to peddle their wares to a captive audience, and it gave teachers enthusiastic about edtech a virtually limitless playground to try out new tools and apps. The tech deluge also necessitated that users create multiple accounts on multiple platforms, each with its own dashboards to monitor and quirks to work around. “I just delete all the emails from tech companies and people offering PD because it’s just too much,” a colleague told me in the later stages of the pandemic.

Even students, the “digital natives'' whom many of us assumed would be much more facile with technology, eventually got tired of juggling so many different platforms. In each of my classes — from freshman introductory programming to my senior-level advanced placement calculus — as the months went on, I noticed much lower student engagement with numerous tech platforms I used to teach. Every new app seemed to fill the gap and provide features that other apps were missing, so it was tempting to try and find a use case for all of them, but the experience left us dazed, confused and apathetic.

Much of my time was spent learning keystrokes and navigating preferences instead of thinking about the more impactful question of how to incorporate technology in a meaningful way that would facilitate the human aspects of teaching and learning, like discourse and creativity. The time I spent fiddling and tweaking classroom tech gave me a harmless, mindless and justifiable escape from confronting the realities of an unprecedented worldwide pandemic, but these distractions were also emblematic of my worldview before the world changed. My preference for a technological solution above all others was as much an unconscious attempt to mitigate and hide deficiencies in my own teaching as it was about my belief in the superiority of bits and bytes. This was a hard truth to swallow, one which spurred me to delete more than a few accounts and intentionally cherish the slivers of human contact that managed to make it through digital filters and firewalls.

Observing my classes during these early days back to in-person instruction and seeing a sea of silent, unresponsive, and almost shell-shocked students, I felt more defeated, ineffective and powerless than at any other time in my career. There is an exhaustion that lingers from that experience, an exhaustion that teachers have not had the time and space to recover from before being thrown back into the classroom to make up learning losses and bolster social-emotional learning deficits.

Accepting What Never Was

As we continue on in this new school year, I finally feel a sense of normalcy has returned to our campus. Classrooms are filled with excited and happy student voices, but among us teachers, there is still skepticism about edtech that remains. While that may seem unfortunate, it is actually healthy and, in the long run, serves as a cautionary tale for us all. Like all of the human actors in the pandemic drama, edtech was forced into a role that it was never designed for.

Our humanity remains at the heart of good teaching, and tech is best used to support, enhance and facilitate the human-to-human interactions that underlie it. When it tries to assume a starring role and become all things to all people, its rapidly diminishing benefits become outweighed by its drawbacks. While my digital utopia never came to fruition, at least edtech has given us a better ability to distinguish between a dream and reality.

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Stuart Blythe teaches writing courses at Michigan State University that are officially listed as in-person only. But he makes it clear to students that they are welcome to join any class session remotely via Zoom if they can’t make it in on any given day.

It’s a practice he started at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many students were in quarantine and needed ways to continue learning remotely. Now, having gone to the trouble to design course resources that can be accessed remotely and feeling accustomed to turning on a webcam in the classroom, he has continued to embrace a teaching practice that is known as “HyFlex,” a portmanteau of hybrid and flexible.

“For example, this morning I taught a web design course, and one of my students has epilepsy, and he said, ‘I can feel something coming on so I better not come out today,’” Blythe says. “Things come up in students’ lives, and the HyFlex gives them the ability to still be part of a class even when things get in the way.”

But not every educator who tried hybrid teaching of some kind during the pandemic has continued it. Even vocal proponents of HyFlex admit it’s not widely popular among college instructors.

“It’s a pendulum swing, that we need to get people back in the classrooms,” says David Rhoads, director of hybrid and emerging pedagogy at Vanguard University in California, who considers himself a proponent of HyFlex teaching. He says instructors who felt forced to quickly allow for remote options or teach remotely are now eager to get back to what they consider normal.

“Faculty are saying, ‘I’m back in the classroom where I want to be,’” he says, admitting that there is less HyFlex teaching now than during the pandemic.

Rhoads argues that students often feel differently than the people at the podium about returning to the default of all-in-person teaching. “Students discovered the flexibility,” he says, “and now they're demanding it.”

Some data seems to back that up: A survey earlier this year from Tyton Partners found that nearly seven out of 10 students said they preferred courses with at least some virtual component, while more than half of faculty members said they preferred face-to-face teaching.

Even so, proponents of hybrid teaching are making a push to build on the experience so many educators gained teaching online during the pandemic. Just last week, for instance, fans of the approach held a workshop and sessions teaching HyFlex practices at the Educause conference in Chicago, and a group called the HyFlex Collaborative held a national conference on HyFlex teaching over the summer. And they point to a recent Educause Horizon Report that listed HyFlex as an emerging practice in part because of an increasing demand from students for greater flexibility in accessing higher education.

Will their efforts succeed? And how much flexibility is best to balance convenience and high-quality teaching?

Built for Flexibility

The first known course that called itself HyFlex emerged in 2006, at San Francisco State University, taught by Brian Beatty, a professor of instructional design and technology. And one main driver was surprisingly mundane: traffic snarls that routinely kept students from getting to class on time.

The goal was to employ a high level of course design from the outset, so that the instructor built all the course material for students to use either live during a class session (online or in person) or as on-demand modules for those who can’t be there at the appointed time.

“Faculty say it’s more work for them to do that,” says Rhoads. “And 100 percent it’s more work.”

It’s work that pays off, though, Rhoads argues, since it opens the course material to students even when they are sick or unable to attend, and the material can easily be reused over time.

“I’ve had days where I have two people in the room and everyone else is online and vice versa."

Stuart Blythe, an associate professor of writing, rhetoric and American cultures at Michigan State University

“The question that usually comes up is, ‘I don’t have enough time and I don’t have enough money.’ Which is completely 100 percent valid,” he says. That’s why Rhoads argues that institutions should invest in making courses more flexible rather than just leave the work to those teaching the courses.

One of the biggest complaints about the HyFlex model is the logistical challenge for the teacher of attending to those in the physical classroom as well as those logging in remotely on Zoom.

For Blythe, of Michigan State, he says he has gotten better at doing that juggling over time, and that it’s now pretty routine for him in his classes of about 20 students. He says he arranges his computer so his notes are open on one half of the screen and the Zoom display is on the other, “so I can look at the students in front of me or look down at the computer screen and see those students.”

But he admits that when he enters the classroom each day, he has no idea how many will be joining him in person and how many he’ll see only as a small box on a screen.

“I’ve had days where I have two people in the room and everyone else is online and vice versa,” he says. “It probably feels a little weird if it’s just me and another student, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it.”

While Blythe feels the extra effort is worth it to help students, many faculty argue that by trying to serve everyone, even those who can’t attend, the experience is worse for everyone. As one instructor wrote in an essay last year, “everyone lost something in HyFlex courses. The students in class, the remote students and the instructor each felt they’d been given short shrift.”

What’s the ‘Gold Standard’?

The proponents of HyFlex classes are often making a larger argument against the standard lecture model of teaching that is the norm at colleges.

Rhoads, for example, says that complaints about hybrid formats often stem “from believing that traditional way of doing education is the gold standard. I do not believe that.”

He argues that the process of redesigning a course to be taught in various formats — online or in person — pushes instructors to rethink how to best help students achieve the learning outcomes.

“I would love to ask faculty, ‘Do you know of any research on traditional education showing the efficacy?’” he says. (Lectures, for example, are not holding up well in some studies.)

And for those instructors worried that no one will come to an in-person class if an online option is given, he argues that “if you design an experience that students can't get any other way than in person, then I think they’ll come.”

HyFlex is not the only way to make courses flexible, however.

At the University of Central Florida, officials say that while some instructors do HyFlex teaching, they’ve had more takeup for so-called “blended” courses, where some sessions are online and some are in person. Unlike in the HyFlex model, where students can pick whether to come or not on any given class, the blended model means that, say, for a class that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Tuesday sessions will be held in person and the Thursday sessions will be online.

“We train faculty to take advantage of the in-person moments to do the things that can only be done in person,” says Thomas Cavanagh, vice provost for digital learning at the University of Central Florida. As a result, he says, “those classes have the highest review from students, they get the highest grades and they have the lowest withdrawal rates.”

Rhoads, the HyFlex advocate at Vanguard University, hopes that the pendulum will start to swing back to online again as educators have time to properly design flexible classes.

“Professors are kind of beat coming out of the pandemic,” he says. “We have to get them refreshed and say, ‘Shake it off for a minute.’ I think many more faculty actually know what they need to do — they need to do more to be flexible.”

© Central Michigan University