Upskill fatigue: will hybrid and hyflex tip academics over the edge?

Hands up if you’re feeling exhausted. I’m fairly confident that every reader working in a higher education institution has their hand up right now. For academics, we feel it from online teaching, seemingly endless Zoom meetings and pressure to meet research outcomes.

Staff cuts across the sector, including at my university, have left me lamenting the loss of institutional knowledge from long-standing staff who have (smartly) chosen to take voluntary redundancy, as well as the overall lack of staff to handle key functions such as student enquiries and academic integrity/misconduct.

We’ve all talked about how Covid was the crisis we needed to have, and at almost every webinar I attend about teaching transformation and the pandemic, people throw around the statistic that we’ve completed what would normally be a five-year transformation in a year (if anyone knows where this comes from,  please let me know – my web searching hasn’t found a source).

This process of transformation under uncertain conditions is contributing to something I call “upskill fatigue” – exhaustion from trying to learn so many new things (and just as you think you’ve sorted out how to use that technology or tool, there is a pivot to something new).

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We’ve learned how to use every video conferencing and meeting tool under the sun, numerous organisational collaboration tools (Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Slack), new LMS functionality, how to translate our on-campus activities into Zoom-suitable activities and online exams, and so much more.

I love to learn new things, but I still groan at the requirement to sign up to another webinar to stay current and up to date – and it seems like there is more to learn than ever. The most recent new things to contribute to my upskill fatigue are hybrid and hyflex teaching.

They are popping up in every higher education newsletter or online conference invitation I receive and are often touted as a panacea for our current struggles. In many countries with high proportions of international students, some may have chosen to return to their home country and study remotely or, as in the case of Australia, such students are physically unable to enter the country to study on campus.

This means that most subjects will need an online learning option and, with often smaller enrolment numbers meaning there may be insufficient students to have a full on-campus class of 30 to 40 students plus a separate online offering, hybrid teaching is one of the solutions − a simultaneous class for students on-campus in a room with the teacher while students watch online as well. Hyflex is an update on hybrid, allowing students to choose to study entirely asynchronously without any requirement to attend live classes.

As a novice to hybrid and hyflex teaching, my initial exposure had me overwhelmed – hyflex teaching seems to require a great deal more learning design experience and support, additional technology and the ability of the academic to be agile around using such new technologies.

I recently won an Australian national teaching excellence award for my integration of technology and innovative learning pedagogy. It stands to reason that if I’m feeling apprehensive about hybrid and hyflex, other academics are too.

THE Campus resource: How to focus efforts to upskill staff

My readings around best practice in hybrid teaching indicate that rooms with technology to support the pedagogy are needed; that each class needs careful learning design consideration for online and on-campus elements. Best practice hybrid and hyflex teaching reports all include on-demand, immediate classroom support and the provision of teaching assistants – but how many institutions are able (and willing) to provide such support?

The economic status of higher education is precarious – will institutions be willing to invest in the spaces, technology and workload support required to effectively teach hybrid? And could they do these things quickly? Or will institutions ask educators to “make do” based on the anticipation that, with increased vaccination, higher education will be “back to normal” in the near future?

Dedicated educators with the financial resources might spend their own money on the technology and subscriptions to online tools required to make online and hybrid teaching work, but what about our sessional and casual academics?

The most glaring area of support required for hybrid classrooms is teaching support – most case studies point to smaller classes with one educator (on average, it seems, 25 students or less) and anything larger requires a teaching assistant.

But given the tight budgets, will universities open the purse strings, or will we be pushing our staff to cognitive overload and exhaustion? Should we be wedded to the 40/40/20 model? What about a clearer and more respected pathway for educational specialists in higher education, providing dedicated scholarship and research into hybrid and hyflex teaching and learning?

While hybrid may seem like a panacea for the educational limbo we find ourselves in, implementing it poorly as a stopgap measure is likely to cause our educators more harm than good. Having educators without adequate training, learning design assistance, facilities and workload support is likely to pave the way for activities that do not engage the class, leaving online students cut adrift as observers.

Research into firm performance and investment has found that companies that invest in innovation and research and development are better off than their competitors – so why not invest to help faculty provide the best hybrid or hyflex learning experiences? Surely the returns would be self-evident.

Amanda White is an education-focused academic at the University of Technology Sydney’s business school. Her interests are in team-based learning, collaborative learning spaces and academic integrity.