I used to teach a course on “Contemporary Spiritual Writing,” which was primarily a discussion about spiritual issues as reflected in contemporary articles, journals, etc. The class was online, 100% asynchronous, and what was remarkable about the eight week experience (a summer course) was the degree of participation and intellectual and emotional commitment of the students. As I recall we had about 18 students, and the approach was fairly straightforward. The course was set up around “themes,e.g., spiritual journey, life transitions, etc. I set up the assignments, often, with a short presentation– a few pages of text and images, videos, etc. and asked students to read relevant articles in our anthologies. Students were divided into groups and expected to work through questions about readings as a team and then pose a team response and question to the class discussion board. Actually a pretty traditional approach. (They also kept a variety of journals.)

What was remarkable, though, was the work on the group level. Students quickly bonded and invested themselves in the conversations as they wrangled with some pretty deep issues. Teams would post summaries of their conversation which included an “answer” to the question prompt, and then they would be a discussion free- for-all on the open class forum comparing/analyzing the summaries from the various groups.

Maybe it was because the students were self-selected,and they made emotional/spiritual connections with life-death matters, but there was a resonance with the subject and a sense of engagement, which I rarely experienced in a F2F class. Students spoke freely about their spiritual journey and struggle, and there was an overriding civility and compassion that to my mind was amazing. Not to go on about this, but it ranks as one of the best teaching experiences I’ve ever had, and I’d say the students found it transformational.

Certainly this isn’t unique to me–other instructors have had similar experiences. I guess we’re still left with your question about needing research to better understand how we pick our learning spaces for a hybrid course.

One last note: later that summer as I was walking by the campus bookstore someone called out my name. It turned out to be one of the students from that class. She had recognized me because I had created an introductory video, but I didn’t recognize her since I didn’t require students to post pictures of themselves. How ironic, had she not stopped me (and we had a most wonderful conversation which picked up where we left off in class online) I would have walked by one of my students from that class.

In your closing paragraph you note that “Online and hybrid learning provides a chance to re-think the role and purpose of the whole university campus, as well as what we should be doing in classrooms when students have online learning available any time and anywhere.” I think that’s the nub of the matter. As soon as we realize that learning can happening in online, F2F, and hybrid spaces, then the question is not only what is the whole campus experience about, but what’s the intents and purposes of education itself? We have to move, it seems, beyond higher and hire education to something else.

I. You could argue, as Mark does, that F2F, is a good starting point for students to meet each other and develop rapport as part of a hybrid learning environment, but community building, if that’s what we want to call it, can also happen online and move to a F2F experience. Consider Meetup, and hybrid courses where students meet first online and then get together in a physical classroom. If a campus has faculty with particular expertise, specific resources, facilities, campus organizations, projects, events, etc., then that might warrant using the campus.

2. If we consider online and F2F as learning spaces, then the question might be if we have a particular assignment, program, etc., which “space” helps maximize the learning experience, develops community, student engagement, etc., etc.?

3. Boston Architecture College offers a unique distance Master of Architecture degree. It’s a low residency program in which students, who already have jobs at design firms around the country, work on their projects online, and then once a semester they come to Boston for an intense week-long studio and residency. Perhaps it’s the very nature of “design thinking” learning, but this model provides a tremendous opportunity for collaboration, skill building, critical thinking, and overall student engagement and faculty mentoring. I think that their hybrid model is even more powerful than the on-the-ground Master’s degree as students can connect and share design work online, which culminates each semester in their on-campus residency. All to say, that I think this model (I’m prejudiced–I was the former VP of online learning) has figured out how to best use each learning environment to its advantage.