STAFF
Key Considerations
What are the key considerations for academic staff and departments interested in designing HL offerings?
HL offers ample instructional design support and (limited) funding* to partially buy in lecturer time to allow for development capacity of HL modules, but only during the first-round development and implementation stage. The viability of the programme, and associated financial risk, is therefore a key consideration for the faculty.
* This funding cannot replace full lecturer remuneration. It is a smaller amount to alleviate for example their teaching load while they spend time on developing online learning materials.
Hear from some of our academics about their experiences with multimodal course design.
How would you describe your experience of designing and eventually presenting a hybrid course?
What did you find valuable from the experience?
What did you find challenging during the creative process of developing a Hybrid Learning programme?
Once the course was implemented, what was your experience of facilitated hybrid learning.
What would you recommend to colleagues starting this journey?
It is as important to consider your prospective students’ context. HL requires students to have sufficient access to Internet, personal devices and a basic level of digitial literacy, in order to learn online. The technical and curricular design of the module can be adapted to be as responsive as possible to their context, but the HL funding application should first demonstrate that you are aware of their learning needs (in terms of how, when and where the cohort will be learning) even if these needs are quite diverse.
For more recommendations, click on Frequently Asked Questions.
Staff context:
Department chairs, lecturers, and other academic staff that will be involved in the process should further consider the following:
- Do you have sufficient capacity and time, to commit to the curriculum design and technical HL development process? (If you are unsure of how much time this will take, please contact the HL team and/or your CLT advisor).
- If you foresee that you will need some support to make time for HL development, what kind of support intervention will help you? “For example”: Do you need to alleviate your teaching load or request teaching assistant/tutor support? Will you need to identify external subject matter experts to help develop some of the course material? HL funding may not be able to address all these needs, but an awareness of your unique context should certainly inform both your discussions with faculty leadership and the HL team, as you apply for funding.
- When would you like to implement the hybrid offering? Does your timeline allow for the administrative process of registering a programme/module, or updating and resubmitting module registration forms? Please contact the Centre for Academic Planning and QA, or your CTL advisor, if you need to better understand the typical timelines involved.
- Do you have buy-in and support from the rest of your department and faculty (including the faculty manager, Vice-Deans and Dean)?
