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The adult education program at the university where I’m working as an instructional designer recently decided to implement their version of HyFlex instruction in their program. The only FLEXible aspect of their program is that students may self-select whether they take the face-to-face option OR the remote option. Once this decision is made, the student remains in that delivery mode.
In considering the implications for federal financial aid and for accreditation (NC-SARA and NWCCU, our accrediting body), students who opt for the synchronous online mode of instruction, are essentially online students. Those who opt for face-to-face instruction are not. My question is, for those of you who give students the full-fledged FLEXability to choose whichever delivery mode works for them on a given day, do you classify your students as in-person or online? How does this work with financial aid and accreditation?
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Patrick, your approach seems to be a good way to constrain students so your reporting can be accurate. A bit like the tail wagging the dog, if you ask me, but I understand this systemic influence.
We treat any class with the possibility of 50% or more online participation as “distance courses” – new this year. I’m not sure how my university will report this data, but I expect they’ll count all students as distance students for reporting purposes. So we’ll likely be overcounting a bit.
Until our reporting requirements change to adapt to HyFlex, I think there will always be something compromised, either student flexibility (your approach it seems) or reporting accuracy (likely our approach). Which is worse? 🙂
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Very difficult situation. Thanks for raising it Patrick – I had not thought of this before and it raises some interesting questions. For student learning, inflexibility of modality is worse. For students’ ability to pay for college, overreporting distance courses is worse. Both can affect student persistence.
A compromise could be to take attendance during the course and report the course as in-person for those who attended a certain percentage of classes, and online for those who did not. Laborious bean-counting for institutions, but probably the most beneficial for the students.
Really though, I wonder how financial aid and accreditation organizations define in-person courses currently? I would bet that “in-person” is not a clearly defined term. For example, I am sure it is quite possible for a student to miss a majority of classes in some regular single-modality in-person classes and still pass the course.
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I just looked up how the housing allowance for veterans is calculated and found this definition: “If any portion of a class requires students to physically attend class, then it receives the same housing allowance as an on-campus course.”
This is quite a generous definition. It would be possible make that work with very little affect on student flexibility or administrative work.
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Kim, your comment about how we define “in-person attendance” is right on. I know many faculty who do not track attendance at all. And many students decide not to attend in person, but just do the assignments and take the tests to try to pass the class. (Most do pass, it seems.)
As we encounter more administrative challenges to HyFlex due to reporting requirements, I think it’s useful to ask what we are ALSO doing about those requirements for in-person and various forms of online participation. (quality concerns also apply here – how many of us have a rigorous quality review and control system for in-person learning? (none I know of)
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