Faculty Fellows Series: Perspectives from a HyFlex Classroom

This semester, many instructors sought to provide flexibility for students in the way that they interact and participate in class. In using a HyFlex, short for Hybrid-Flexible, course design students have the choice to participate in-person, online synchronously or online asynchronously.

This series of articles from our DELTA Faculty Fellows will explore the ways that they have implemented HyFlex this semester across a variety of subjects.

This is the third and final article in this series featuring Lina Battestilli, teaching associate professor, Computer Science.

HyFlex Motivation

I am currently teaching a CSC113, a first year introductory programming course with an enrollment of  approximately 200 students, and a third year 400-level computer science elective course with an enrollment of approximately 60 students using the HyFlex format. Due to the continuing pandemic situation, I found the HyFlex course design option to be the best approach to teaching my courses. I appreciate the flexibility this approach has offered to my students because I don’t have to dictate how they choose to attend each week, it is their individual choice. In these courses, about 50% of students choose to attend in-person and about 40% choose to attend via Zoom. Surprisingly, I have not even met some of my 400-level course students, as they have always chosen the Zoom sessions over the in-person lectures. Even so, this approach is working really well for everyone involved.

This is a chart of my overall approach to using technology applications in my course offerings:

Background: CSC 113 Introduction to Computing

In 2019, DELTA assisted me in converting this course to a flipped classroom approach. I built on this concept by incorporating the HyFlex mode of delivery in the one hour and 50-minute session led by me. My teaching assistants just added a Zoom option to their two hour and 45-minute labs that prior to COVID-19 were conducted only in-person. For the first test of this semester, all 195 students took the test as scheduled with some completing it via Zoom. I thought that was pretty amazing, given the fact that we are in a semester that is still affected by the pandemic.

The chart below shows a detailed version of my HyFlex teaching approach:*Note: I like to use my own laptop during my lectures (specific programs + touchscreen for annotating powerpoint presentations).  The setup would be even simpler for instructors who only use the desktop computer in the classroom.