Ed/Tech must-reads 270525

How do higher education staff understand the terms hybrid, hyflex and blended learning? Choice, modality and uncertainty from Research in Learning Technology

Remember the good old days when all we had to worry about was a global pandemic? When we had endless discussions about what we should call different modes of teaching, based on when and where they occurred? Evidently we never quite got to the bottom of that discussion about hybrid vs hyflex vs blended learning. For what it is worth, my take was the hyflex involved teaching both in-person and online students simultaneously, for reasons which seemed to make sense at the time. Hybrid and blended I never could really distinguish though, as both seem to speak to a combination of learning and teaching activities which could occur either in person or online and either synchronously or asychronously. (Which seems like most modern teaching). Emily Nordmann (Uni Glasgow), Barbora Hronska (Glasgow) and Jill MacKay (Uni Edinburgh) recently surveyed 152 academics in their neck of the woods and found that we are still kind of unclear about it all. A key factor absent from my understanding of these terms evidently is student choice - hyflex offering the most. They suggest clarifying definitions and using them more consistently. The exploration of who holds which definitions and why is worth a look.

Rethinking modalities in teaching and learning from The Educationalist

Alexandra Mihai (Maastricht Uni) approaches this question from a slightly different angle - asking why we didn’t take the opportunity to rethink these modalities when we had a chance. (I suspect because people were exhausted and then GenAI came along). She paints a rich picture of the options in the current landscape, from independent learning to guided, synchronous to asynchronous, process oriented to documentary, and beyond. As with most questions, there is no single definitive answer, more of an ‘it’s depends’ response but the key message that we can and should be aware of the options in order to mix and match is well made.

Assessing ChatGPT’s Capability as a New Age Standardized Patient: Qualitative Study from JMIR Medical Education

There are far too many authors to list in discussing this article but I think this may be the first time that I have discussed work from the Caribbean region. I think what caught my eye was the exploration of GenAI chatbots to facilitate the development of communications skills among med students by simulating what they call standardised patients. This seems like one of the safer ways to play with Clippy 2.0 in education, given that people aren’t relying on it for factual knowledge and creating opportunities to practice chatting to patients can be time and resource intensive. (This is nothing new, I worked on a project with similar aims in the late 2000s using virtual worlds - but slightly less sophisticated bots). Overall the study finds that this can be useful but care needs to be taken.

Career Options for Third Space Practitioners webinar Thursday 29th May, 12 noon AEST from ASCILITE TELedvisors Network

The job market for third space types (learning designers, educational technologists, academic developers etc) has always had its ups and downs but it seems particularly fraught currently. What better time then to hear from a number of people what they did to move up/down/across to find something new and better. Hosted by Elaine Huber (ASCILITE), it features Naomi Millgate (CQU), Jess Ashman (Cadmus), Courtney Shalavin (TAFE NSW), Amy Martin (AITD/QUT), and Carmen Vallis (USyd). I think this might be a popular one.