Hybrid learning

What exactly is hybrid learning and how does it differ from blended learning? Is hybrid learning a trend your company should also be considering? What are the flipped classroom, seamless learning and pervasive learning? And how can you take advantage of the benefits of both analog and digital learning without seeing them as being in opposition to each other? To enable you to design state-of-the-art learning processes, we explain these terms and tell you what hybrid learning is all about.

It seems the hybrid century has dawned: Two different things are being brought together and combined into one entity. Hybrid cars are powered by electricity and fuel; the pandemic made hybrid working environments the norm. And hybrid societies with complex networks are starting to appear on the horizon, where people are interacting with intelligent digital technologies in a completely new way. Hybridization is also starting to emerge in learning strategies, in the form of a fusion of analog and digital formats.

Since the late 1990s, the combination of analog and digital learning formats has been known as “blended learning”. The idea behind this is that when two learning formats—face-to-face learning and online learning—are used concurrently, they deliver more effective learning. With blended learning, learning objectives are achieved through the sequential use of face-to-face and online learning. It can focus on 1) eLearning, 2) face-to-face learning in a physical space, or 3) a balance of the two.

Blended learning is often not literally blended, because the formats alternate and provide complementary educational input. One example of this is the inverted or flipped classroom. Theoretical knowledge is built up before being consolidated through discussion, for instance through interactive web-based training. Learners regulate their own acquisition of the knowledge. Face-to-face events consolidate knowledge through collective reflection and discussion. Blended learning thus involves switching between different learning formats and can focus on analog or digital delivery, depending on learning objectives and context.

Nowadays, we take intelligent and networked technologies with us wherever we go: We don’t just sit in front of computers, we literally carry them around in our pockets. So smartphones and tablets have naturally become a part of training seminars and university lectures. They open up seminar rooms and lecture halls to learning resources from the World Wide Web. They facilitate interaction between the auditorium and teachers. Face-to-face learning interweaves with online technologies, becoming hybrid.

The ubiquity of the technology impacts on the design of learning processes. Digital learning formats enable completely new forms of social and collaborative learning, both synchronous and asynchronous: Virtual classrooms bring social learning into the world of eLearning. Collaboration software provides new ways of working together to co-create knowledge; ways that are not constrained by time and space. The boundaries between physical and virtual learning spaces are blurring, and the learning process is becoming hybrid.

This dissolution of boundaries is also present in less well-known approaches. Seamless learning and pervasive learning take different views of learning processes. They both believe the best way to learn is to use technology to flow between learning environments, learning formats and learning opportunities.

The difference between hybrid learning and blended learning is therefore that the face-to-face and online phases of blended learning take place separately from one another. Hybrid learning, on the other hand, denotes a sequence of learning activities that cannot be unambiguously assigned to either the analog or the digital sphere.

Example: A learning activity starts in the seminar room and involves internet research in groups on various aspects of a topic. The results of the group work are combined into a shared digital document. Despite taking place in a physical learning space, most of the learning activity is digital. Conversely, the next step, discussion and reflection on results, can take place in online sessions regardless of where learners are located; these can be digitally enhanced by linking up with specialists, for example. Here, too, many of the benefits of classroom learning can be replicated digitally.

Tip for shared documents: An authoring tool not only enables knowledge to be pooled collaboratively, it also enables knowledge to be efficiently presented for the purposes of internal learning processes, and shared in a company’s learning ecosystem.