Rapid ABC for hybrid teaching
Support to enable a move to hybrid education.
The learning design service and school-based learning technologists have adapted the ABC workshops such that they can support the move to hybrid education.
What is hybrid education?
This refers to a model whereby students are enabled to transition easily between online and on campus education, and where no differentiation is made between online and on campus students, but rather they are brought together by design.
Due to the rapid transition to hybridity at Edinburgh, focus is placed on the use of key supported learning technology: Learn, Collaborate, Resource Lists and Media Hopper. It also draws upon the work undertaken so far by the Learn Foundations project; this has focussed on improving the student experience in Learn through increasing consistency in the design of the online environment.
Why ABC?
ABC workshops have already proved themselves to be highly effective in enabling rapid (re)design of courses across the University, including undergraduate, postgraduate and MOOCs. Not only do they promote good pedagogic principles in learning design, they also link to the use of supported learning technology.
What are the options?
Those undertaking course (re)development can choose either:
- The full 2-hour online ABC ‘sprint’ workshop, facilitated by School-based learning technologists, to fundamentally reimagine the course using the complete ABC framework; or
- To utilise our ABC toolkits, supported by School-based learning technologists. Colleagues will be guided to quickly reconfigure their existing courses to enable a move to hybridity without undergoing a full redesign. This will not only guide them towards appropriate hybrid ‘micro patterns’ for their learning activities (e.g. lectures, field work) but it will also help them map the ‘macro pattern’ of their course structure to a corresponding structure for the associated course on Learn.
Macro patterns
Conceptualising a course as a macro pattern aims to serve as a bridge between understanding the existing course structure and planning its redesign to accommodate the move to hybrid education.
The macro pattern of a course would be represented within the Learn course in the Course Materials area.
Micro patterns
Micro patterns are examples of how the learning activities which make up the macro pattern could be rethought, in order to facilitate hybrid learning.
An ABC workshop would involve exploring the macro pattern and investigating how the activities might be redesigned as micro patterns: sequences of actions, suited to hybrid education for the course topic, level and cohort size.
ABC Learning design Macro / Micro pattern chooser app
More information
For more information about Learning Design development at the University of Edinburgh, please contact the Learning Design team, we are based in Learning, Teaching and Web Services Directorate, Information Services.