Keynote: Choreography and improvisation within hybrid higher education

Travelling back to Edinburgh from Dublin (taxi-ferry-trains-bus), where I yesterday delivered a keynote presentation as part of the conference, Sustainable Hybrid Education: Building a Community of Practice to Rise to the Needs of the Future. It was part of the Erasmus+ Hybrid-e project, which is funded jointly by the University of Amsterdam, Aristotle University Thessaloniki, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Teaching and Learning Unit at University College Dublin. The conference was organised David Jennings and Eoin McEvoy, who put together an event that really successfully brought together colleagues from a range of institutions and disciplines, and working in different roles.

The title of my presentation was ‘Choreography and improvisation in hybrid higher education’, which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and am currently writing-up with Tim Fawns, Joe Noteboom, and Jen Ross, based upon our experiences of teaching fusion courses within the MSc in Education Futures.

Here's a recording of my presentation on YouTube.
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And these are my slides and references:

My talk was collected around the following propositions, which draw on my teaching and research around hybrid education:

• The possibilities of fusion teaching are never simply a matter of what digital resources can bring to the combined physical and digital classroom. It is more productive, we have argued, to recognise fusion education as a choreography of space, time, technology and pedagogy.
• This is a choreography that extends beyond the conventional interest in human bodies and interests, to also consider the wider social and material actors that shape educational activities.
• Conceptualising fusion education as choreography is also in step with the idea of teaching as performance, which opens the way to recognising its unpredictable and contingent nature.
• Our ability to choreograph and then improvise becomes easier at the point that we recognise fusion to be more than a series of processes and activities, but also a way of thinking about education

On this final idea, I proposed that the design of successful hybrid (or ‘fusion’ as we prefer to describe our approach within the Edinburgh Futures Institute) education benefits from a particular mindset, which can be described as follows:

• Designing courses and activities from a fusion-first position, rather than creating an ‘online version’ or ‘delivering classroom teaching digitally’.
• Joining up, and seeking out the potentialities, of the different modes of engagement. What can asynchronicity, or a more diverse cohort, bring to conversation and learning?
• Recognising that while ‘online’ and ‘on site’ are administratively convenient, they describe a mode of attendance rather than a type of student. An ‘on site’ student is also an online learner.
• Thinking about how our language reveals and enacts assumptions about pedagogy. ‘Attendance’, ‘arriving in class’, ‘being present’, ‘eye contact’, ‘campus’ also apply, albeit differently, online

What I also argued in my keynote was that all of the above is helped by seeking out the expertise and expectations of different stakeholders within teaching in learning. When hybrid education (and all education really), is never a straight exchange between student-and-teacher, and certainly never just about the tech, there is value in bringing together learning designers, technologists, AV specialists, academics, learners and other groups besides.