Originally posted on December 5, 2011 by Brian Beatty
- Personalize – “Addresses My Unique Needs: Products and interactions with the company are tailored for me and my situation.”
HyFlex courses may be designed to meet the unique (and personal) needs of learners, especially as they relate to completing course requirements and participating in class activities. If one of the main reasons you have chosen the HyFlex design is to allow students the freedom to choose how they participate, then you are probably implementing a “customer-centric” principle, even if you don’t want to call your students “customers.”
You may have chosen the HyFlex design for other reasons that have nothing (or very little) to do with providing a personalized experience for students. For example, you might choose HyFlex to provide scheduling flexibility, allowing students to enroll in two course that meet F2F at the same time but provide students with the freedom to complete the class as an online student. In this case, you may find that an unintended consequence of implementing HyFlex design is that students do get a chance to customize their participation and in doing so create a personalized experience for themselves.
As I engage with faculty and administrators around HyFlex implementation, I’ve found that almost every situation ends up providing a personalized learning experience (or at least the opportunity for personalization) for students.
So I think we can safely add “addresses unique student participation needs” to the growing value-added list!