How to transform school learning system into a hybrid format?
What is a hybrid education model?
A hybrid model, also known as a blended learning model, combines both offline (in-person) and online learning elements to create an educational experience that blends advantages of both models and is tailored to school’s standards and practices. Consider it a traditional classroom learning enhanced by digital technology that enriches both in-class and home learning activities.
Before understanding the hybrid learning model, it is important to compare traditional offline learning and online learning. Offline learning relies on personal interaction among students and teachers and follows a structured schedule. While it works well for student socialization, enables teamwork, and encourages discipline, it offers less flexibility and relies heavily on limited physical resources. Online learning systems, on the contrary, let students be flexible and progress through the material at their own pace, at the same time offering a diverse and rich educational content.
Digitalized educational processes may succeed in combining the best of both worlds: discipline and individual learning preferences, real-life interaction and accessible virtual communication, cost savings and diverse learning resources.
Digital learning, too, implies certain investment — virtual learning infrastructure and human resources to take care of deployment, configuration and administration of this infrastructure. After discussing the benefits of digitalization in more detail, we will have a look at the technological aspect of the transformation.
Benefits of digitalization in education
Besides the more fundamental benefits mentioned earlier, such as flexibility and a potential to offer more diverse educational content, there are some other perks of digital education worth looking into:
- Personalization. Digital platforms can incorporate adaptive learning algorithms, tailoring content to individual students’ needs and abilities, thereby enhancing the learning experience.
- Engagement. Multimedia elements, gamification, and interactive tools can make learning more engaging and interactive, increasing student motivation and participation.
- Evaluation. Ability to run tests and request assignment submissions in a digital form offers more opportunities for progress evaluation.
- Communication. Teacher-student communication, announcements and lesson planning can be streamlined through a digital platform, ensuring ultimate access to up-to-date information.
- Data analysis. Digital tools enable the collection of vast amounts of data on student performance, which can be analyzed to identify areas of improvement and inform instructional decisions.
- Global collaboration. Digitalization allows the school to include distant collaborators and invited teachers to contribute to the program, providing unique knowledge and fostering cross-cultural communication and global perspectives.
- Accessibility. Ability to access the assets and courses from anywhere allows for a more inclusive approach where students with disabilities and other limitations can be included in the learning process.
Building a digital learning infrastructure
How to build a digital learning infrastructure in a school that contributes to a hybrid education format? Let’s discover the essential stages of the process.
Define your objectives
First, you must assess your school’s needs to set clear objectives and allocate appropriate budget. Start by conducting a comprehensive evaluation to understand the current state of technology in your school, the requirements of teachers and students, and the goals of your hybrid education program — to draft your objectives.
Taking into account the school’s performance goals, answer a question: what do you want to achieve with your shift? Is it accessibility for all groups of students? Or is it a richer learning experience? Build a comprehensive priority list for your plan.
Plan infrastructure and costs
Develop a budget that includes costs for hardware, software, training, and ongoing maintenance. Explore funding options such as grants, government programs, or partnerships.
Once you understand a budget framework, it is time to estimate the user scale and select the right hardware and software to support your system. Hiring an external technology consultant or partnering with a reliable provider might be of a great help. An update for your existing infrastructure might be needed as well: assess and upgrade your school’s network infrastructure to ensure it can handle the increased demands of hybrid learning, considering bandwidth, Wi-Fi coverage, and network security.
Procure necessary software and hardware
Purchase or upgrade the necessary hardware, including devices for students and teachers (laptops, tablets), interactive whiteboards, projectors, and software licenses for educational tools and platforms.
In a basis of a virtual classroom environment lies a learning management system. Open-source solutions like Moodle can effectively accommodate the user network, provide file storage and sharing capabilities, and help streamline assignments, progress tracking, assessments, feedback, and teacher-student communication. With an integrated office suite like ONLYOFFICE Docs, such a platform can offer document editing and collaboration within your school portal to ensure better security and convenience. Besides, you may want to establish centralized means of communication like chats and video conferencing tools.
Ensure in advance that all digital content and tools are accessible to students with disabilities, complying with accessibility standards like WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).
Finally, implement robust data security and privacy measures to protect student and teacher data. Develop and communicate a clear privacy policy.
Plan digital content and create curriculum
Invest in digital educational content and resources that align with your curriculum. This could include e-books, online courses, and multimedia materials. Team up with coordinators and teachers to help create a digital library, brainstorm the ideas, and take into account everybody’s approach to the teaching process.
Provide personnel and student training
Organize comprehensive training for teachers to effectively use digital tools and platforms for teaching. This training should cover both technical and pedagogical aspects of online teaching. As a part of your program, train teachers to design engaging hybrid lessons that integrate in-person and online activities effectively.
Students will also benefit greatly from training activities. The goal of such training is to show students how to use school’s digital tools for learning and ensure they understand online etiquette and cybersecurity best practices.
Learning software providers and technology consultants you are working with are likely able to provide such training sessions for your school and will be a great contact to start with.
Within your own team, you will also need to establish a helpdesk or IT support contacts to assist teachers and students with technical issues, troubleshooting, and maintenance in the future.
Run regular monitoring and evaluation
Continuously monitor the effectiveness of your digital learning infrastructure through feedback from teachers and students. Use data to make improvements and introduce new hardware and software elements. Regularly review and update your digital learning strategy based on feedback, changing educational needs, and technological advancements.
Community is an important asset
Creating a healthy and effective system of digital learning in a school is a collaborative effort that involves the active participation of teachers, parents, and students themselves. Each group plays a crucial role in ensuring the success of digital learning.
Keep parents informed about the digital learning program, provide resources for them to support their children’s learning, and solicit their feedback. Encourage teachers to create and share digital content, fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration, where benchmarking and exchange of ideas are a driver. Besides helping you build a more effective learning environment in your school, special meetup sessions for teachers, parents, or both, will also make a positive impact on relationships within a school community.
Collaboration in your digital classroom with ONLYOFFICE
ONLYOFFICE has years of experience in helping schools and universities around the globe implement and develop online and hybrid learning models. Serving clients like Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Nanjing University, and many others, we provide solutions with functionality tailored to learning and collaboration needs, compliant with privacy regulations, and accessible for organizations of any scale.
Special program for education offers free solutions for schools, including ONLYOFFICE DocSpace cloud with 2 GB of storage and up to 20 admin accounts included.
Want to learn more? Join our series of webinars dedicated to using ONLYOFFICE in education and get a chance to communicate with our team in real time to answer all your questions.
