As faculty members continue to navigate the evolving landscape of hybrid and online education, recent insights from EDUCAUSE’s 2024 Higher Education Trend Watch offer valuable guidance. Amidst the challenges that came to the forefront as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, one notable trend is the large demand for flexibility among both students and faculty. As a response to this, many higher education institutions are updating their infrastructure to accommodate a more geographically diverse workforce and embracing a variety of teaching modalities. There is also a large cultural shift towards refining online and hybrid teaching models, presenting opportunities for faculty to explore innovative approaches. As a result, Penn State has started to offer the Remote Synchronous and Remote Blended modalities this past year.
For Remote Blended it helped refine Penn State’s courses as many hybrid courses host synchronous class sessions. One great resource to have a list of interactive student engagements via Zoom for the online synchronous portion of your class is the Zoom toolkit which is created by Penn State and has several pedagogical approaches with technology.
Another major finding with EDUCAUSE’s 2024 Higher Education Trend Watch is how institutions are establishing programs that take advantage of these course modalities and faculty enhancing their expertise by engaging in professional development opportunities that delve into online assessments, collaborative tools, and effective use of learning management systems. At Penn State one of the university-wide ways to learn more about hybrid learning is the BlendLT program that has an asynchronous learning path and a cohort based formal workshop series. The latter will be announced later in April for the 2024 offering.
Overall, the findings in EDUCAUSE’s 2024 Higher Education Trend Watch showcase the pivotal role faculty play in shaping the future of education and highlight avenues to proactively engage along this journey.