March 10, 2025, by Ben Atkinson
Best Practices for Hybrid Teaching
When teaching in a hybrid environment, there are a number of options available in terms of approach and technologies you can utilise to deliver the best learning experience for your students. Hybrid teaching and learning has grown in prominence in recent years, particularly following the global pandemic as we started to move back to working and studying at home and on campus. However, it is an approach which often requires careful planning to ensure that the delivery is successful and that students in either the in-person or remote environment do not have a lesser experience in the session.
In 2023 JISC hosted an episode of their Beyond the Technology podcast which focused on hybrid teaching and a case study from the University of Nottingham during the 2020/1 academic year. At that time, a research team made up of staff and students from University of Nottingham (project lead) and University of Birmingham (project partner) investigated experiences of hybrid teaching and learning. The principal investigator was Cecilia Goria (University of Nottingham) and the project was supported and funded by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). The project defined hybrid teaching as ‘ refer[ing] to lectures/seminars/classes in which some students are physically present in a classroom and others join online simultaneously from remote locations” and the project gathered a fascinating array of quantitative and qualitative data from over 500 students and nearly 50 staff (teaching and audio-visual/IT) across the two universities. You can find out more about the project by listening to the podcast episode on the JISC website.
Obviously hybrid teaching has moved on somewhat since the days of the global pandemic, but it is still widely used in many areas of the University of Nottingham and the wider HE sector. Hybrid teaching has also now moved beyond just being a lecture where you attend either remotely or in person. There are lots of tools available which lean more towards a blended learning delivery of online and in person teaching, which, today, could be seen as part of the hybrid model. Below, I outline some of the approaches and activity types in Moodle and using other digital tools, that you may wish to consider if you are planning a hybrid teaching session.
Running a Teaching Session via MS Teams
The most obvious and straightforward way to deliver a hybrid teaching session is to use MS Teams, the default online meeting and teaching tool. You can run a variety of sessions using MS Teams and it has the benefit of scheduled sessions being added to the Outlook calendar of both staff and students. In addition, there are a number of features you can utilise within a live session on Teams, these include breakout rooms, polls, whiteboards and more.
If you are running a hybrid session using MS Teams, the usual approach would be to ask students who are not in the classroom to join via the MS Teams link and have the meeting open on the screen so those in the classroom can see and interact with students online. Moreover, once breakout activities begin if you have access to smaller rooms then you can ask students in the classroom to join the meeting too to engage with their peers who are online. If you are asking students who have joined online to speak during the session, you will want to make sure the sound settings are correct in the room and perhaps consider testing this ahead of time. You can also ask students who are online to turn their camera on so that they feel more a part of the session.
- Manage breakout rooms in MS Teams
- Create and share a whiteboard in MS Teams
- Create a Poll in MS Teams
Creating Pre-Recorded Teaching and Learning Resources
There are a number of ways to create pre-recorded content which can aid a hybrid session. In this example, you would create some teaching resources in video format that students might engage with before coming to an online or in-person session. If all students, regardless of if they will be attending in person or online, have engaged with the same pre-recorded content ahead of the teaching session then they will have had the same experience of preparing for a session that might be delivered in a hybrid fashion and this can greatly improve the engagement you will see in any taught session.
You could pre-record your resources using Echo 360 in the same way that you would with a live lecture recording, or you might want to create an interactive PowerPoint resource which has narration embedded. In both cases, as this is pre-recorded content, you would need to make sure that you have corrected the transcript for any mistakes. You can do this within Echo 360 or using MS PowerPoint online for narrated slides.
Moodle Board for Synchronous and Asynchronous Teaching
In Moodle 4.3 a new activity, Moodle Board, was introduced. This is very similar to Padlet in the way that it works, it allows students to engage with a board of posts which has been pre-created with a number of themes or headings across columns. Students add their own posts below each title and can comment and reply to posts from their peers. This activity type is particularly powerful in the hybrid environment. Regardless of it a student is on campus or working remotely, they can engage with a Moodle Board activity and the posts will display on Moodle in real time.
Find out more about Moodle Board in this blog post.
Using Moodle Release Conditions to Guide Students Through Hybrid Sessions
As explored below when using the Group Choice activity, sometimes it is beneficial in a hybrid environment to set up different routes through navigating the content on a Moodle site. This might be due to different groups attending hybrid sessions on different days, or because they have chosen to study a different strand within the module. You can easily achieve this by using release conditions on your Moodle site. In this way you can make content or whole topics available to specific students, or require students to complete one task before the next one is made available to them. This is a powerful method for guiding students learning in a situation where a portion of their learning will be online remotely, as is the case in the hybrid model.
Find out more about Moodle release conditions on Workspace.
Using Moodle Group Choice to Put Power in Student’s Hands
We recently wrote about the new Group Choice activity on Moodle. It allows students to opt into various types of groups which have been created on a Moodle site. This can be very powerful if used in the right way. You could, for example, create several different strands for certain projects which students opt into depending on their interest, with each strand having different hybrid teaching sessions or contact time depending on the topic. You could also use this approach to make certain resources available to select groups after a hybrid teaching session, such as if students request more help or support with a topic.
You can read more about the use of Group Choice activity in this blog post.
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