Flex covers it all ... gradually!
All courses should be designed from a student's perspective. Flex includes asynchronous online (Online), synchronous online (Sync Online), and face-to-face (F2F) instructions. Students determine their own learning path and experience. If they desire, they can choose the extremes, either totally asynchronous or totally synchronous learning. Some students prefer one or the other, but all students are bound by the two.
Flex courses may appear to require a significant amount of work. Time is a factor that most educators seem to overlook. Rome wasn't built in a day. A great design should be long-lasting. With a solid foundation, each semester can improve over the previous one. The term design means careful planning with details. Course design is a long-term plan carried out in steps. Flex is no exception.
Ideally, Flex courses should be first designed as an asynchronous online course and later augmented with synchronous modalities. At least one modality is completely built with consistency and desired rigor. Since Flex covers all modalities, class cancellation, due to the lack of preparation for Academic Continuity, sends a bad image to the public. Asynchronous online learning will always be our 'fallback,' a reliable one. When real-time interactions are not possible because technologies fail in the classroom or severe whether affects the meeting locations, student learning will not be interrupted.
Being unfamiliar with the pros and cons of different modalities and teaching a Flex course for the first time, instructors tend to utilize their experience in F2F settings and expand it to Sync Online. Unfortunately, this can place the Online students as secondary. The susceptibility of F2F and Sync Online to external factors may require hasty and repeated adjustments. Subsequently, course quality and satisfaction tend to suffer. Online students could be the majority of a class. This is one of the reasons why Online courses are frequently perceived as inferior to F2F instructions by the public, even though lecturing is a well-known example of passive learning. In reality, meta-analysis has shown that students learn equally well, and possibly better, in well-designed courses that have an online learning component.
Regardless of modality, 'classroom' interactions help students engage in learning and increase retention. In general, they are divided into three categories: student-instructor interaction, student-student interaction, and student-content interaction. Instructors who have experience in designing Online courses would almost always say that it makes them a better teacher in the F2F settings. After an asynchronous online course is built and polished, an instructor will have a much easier time stepping into Flex the following semester. According to Beatty, when planning for an effective Flex course, it is important to consider four fundamental values: Learner Choice, Accessibility, Reusability, and Equivalency. We recommend the acronym CARE. You can review each of these components through the links below.
