Flexible learning – how far can higher education bend?
In UK higher education post-pandemic, we see a tension emerging between the government’s push for universities to get students back on campus and the fact that many students liked and benefited from online learning over the past two years. While there are many advantages of a campus-based programme – a key one being the sense of belonging – a flexible approach to programmes can allow institutions to reach more students in varied locations and circumstances.
The shift to online during the pandemic was, for the most part, a quick fix and not necessarily designed around learner needs. Last month, an expert panel joined our HE Innovate community webinar to share best practice and advice about flexible learning. Here are some of the nuggets of wisdom they shared:
Getting flexible learning ‘just right’
So, what is flexible learning? For many years digital types of learning have accrued a range of names that are used interchangeably, despite meaning slightly different things, so it seems sensible to define them.
Online learning is perhaps the simplest; it’s a learning experience where all components are delivered online and there’s no in-person contact.
Blended learning is the approach that most UK higher education (HE) programmes have been taking for many years; a campus-based experience supported by online tools such as a virtual learning environment (VLE), online assessments, eBooks.
Hybrid learning is relatively new and akin to hybrid working; students can choose an in-person learning experience or an online one. For example, both groups can attend a lecture or seminar simultaneously, no separation is made between digital and on campus student cohorts.
Flexible learning has a broader scope, building on all of the above; at its heart is a balance between providing economically viable and well managed degrees, and empowering students to customise their pace, place and mode of learning.
In a flexible approach there are almost endless possibilities but getting the balance right can be tricky, as Paula Shaw, Associate Professor of Online Teaching and Learning, University of Derby, explained during the webinar
Flexible learning has a broader scope, building on all of the above; at its heart is a balance between providing economically viable and well managed degrees, and empowering students to customise their pace, place and mode of learning.
In a flexible approach there are almost endless possibilities but getting the balance right can be tricky, as Paula Shaw, Associate Professor of Online Teaching and Learning, University of Derby, explained during the webinar
“If your systems and processes are too rigid your module or programme is likely to break. If you try to add too much flexibility, it’s unstable and unsuitable for students overall. What we’re looking for is an optimum amount of flexibility but with resilience to maintain a functional and student-focussed programme.”
To get it just right you need to be prepared to plan and scaffold the learning across different environments, not just the classroom, and introduce clear learning design with well thought out flexibility for students to make the best use of their time and resources. This will be different for different types of learners so you have to know your students and their challenges.
What about the pedagogy within flexible learning design? Our panel recommends that, rather than sticking to the usual practices and norms of education, you build a more expansive repertoire of new pedagogies, including some you’ve not tried before.
Crucially, take the opportunity to understand and harness the experiences and diversity of your students – empower them to be co-creators, engage them in design, use their experiences to develop activities. Don’t be afraid to adapt and redesign the learning in your course as you go. Each cohort of students on your flexible programme will be different. Have the confidence to take an agile approach to building a course that is innately flexible, not only on its initial design and delivery, but in its potential to flex and optimise each learning activity to meet different cohort’s needs. As Stella Jones-Devitt, Professor of Critical Pedagogy, Staffordshire University said during the webinar,
“Design activities which are built on experiential learning – students’ rich starting points can build confidence and add diverse thinking to your curriculum. Locate them within their learning process so they know how the course is evolving if you’re doing a longer course, how they can actually contribute to the evolution and structure of what you’re trying to do within the sessions.”
Critically, flexibility must be throughout a programme – it’s no good having one flexible micro-credential module and nowhere else for students to go afterwards, or just one flexible module in a traditional programme, or having a brilliantly designed flexible module, if your assessment for that module is strictly rigid. More on this later.
How do you deliver value for money?
That is a question often asked of higher education and, in surveys throughout the pandemic, students said they felt that they were paying for a campus-based university experience but getting an online one which was “worth” less.
The government feels strongly that the value for money of a university education comes through face-to-face contact and the campus experience. There’s no doubt that a sense of academic community (and all the benefits that brings) can be more easily built in-person and if certain teaching and learning is best-suited to (and designed for) physical spaces that students wouldn’t have access to otherwise, such as labs and technical equipment there is a clear link to the value provided by academics and resources. Furthermore, the infrastructures of universities, from libraries to student unions and support services, are designed to serve campus-based students.
Yet, throughout the pandemic universities demonstrated that more of their provision could be accessed online without compromising students’ experiences. This is exactly where flexible learning sits, on the cusp of change. Students are not all the same, they have varying needs. For some, flexible learning can offer even greater value for money. A campus-based university experience of three or four years, and all the
social aspects which we typically expect to come from that, might not provide the best value for money for an international student coming from a lower income country or a student with a job and family or carer responsibilities. As Anika Sharif, BSc Psychology student, University of Derby explained,
I’m a commuter student; I travel to a different city for university. It can get a bit expensive, and it’s also time consuming. […] I think it would be better if it could all be a lot more flexible. So, if there are certain things I don’t need to come in for, like for example lectures can be pre-recorded, that will just make life a lot easier for me and a lot of other students.
A webinar participant echoed these thoughts in the chat by sharing that he records a lecture and schedules it so that students can watch it together and chat, then uses the face to face time for meaningful active learning. Consider where the learning value actually comes from and whether a flexible mode could help more students balance life and study, wherever they are, to achieve success. As Kate Lindsay, Head of Digital Education, University College of Estate Management explained,
As educators, the real thing we need to ask ourselves is, ‘What is the value of attending a synchronous timetabled event?’ I’m not saying there isn’t any value, but we need to really clearly articulate what that value is. As soon as we remove that flexibility of being able to attend anytime, anywhere it presents real challenges for some students, and it starts to privilege some students over others. The majority of our students choose to attend asynchronously, and they succeed. It's time to get rid of some presumptions that synchronous is better and contact hours are only one type of thing. It’s much more complex than that, and much more exciting.
Best practice in flexible learning
While we’d love to be able to give you a formula with all the elements and quantities for an optimum flexible learning experience, it’s not that straightforward. Our key recommendation is to think about your subject, your learners, their context and what you want them to achieve from the learning experience. Look for evidence-based practice – find out what has worked for other educators and adapt it to work for you.
The Advance HE Flexible Learning Framework and the Flexible Learning Toolkit, which have been developed through a QAA collaborative enhancement project, are good places to start. These tools can support academic development teams to design flexible curricula, at both the module and programme level.
However, we will take a look at two areas which are high on the agenda when considering a move to more flexible learning.
Attendance and engagement
You’ll probably want to include some online synchronous (live) sessions in your flexible learning design but, as we learned over the past two years, attendance and engagement in this mode can be even more challenging than face-to-face. Notwithstanding factors beyond the immediate control of you as the educator, (for example students’ access to technology and physical or mental ability to join an online lesson), it’s your job to give students reasons to be there and to want to participate in the learning experience. As Paula Shaw explained,
“If you’re going to use an online synchronous session you’ve still got to entice people in – your presence there has got to welcome students into that space and so you’ve got to rethink that session. A recorded lecture is a study material; it isn’t a contact, it isn’t engagement. So instead think about making the synchronous session exciting, having great opportunities for bringing students in, and having those conversations.”
Bear in mind what students might want from a live session: Is it connection with their peers? Is it a chance to ask their tutor questions? Is it an opportunity to discuss complex topics? Better still, why not ask them at the start, the middle and towards the end of the course, so that your live sessions cater for what they need at each stage.
“With synchronous sessions, I think it would be really helpful if they were interactive with breakouts and discussions, just so I feel like I can be included, and not just be zoning out, because that will happen. One of our programmes varies the time of their synchronous sessions to consider international students in different time zones.”
- Anika Sharif, BSc Psychology student, University of Derby
Micro-credentialing
From 2025, the UK’s lifelong loan entitlement will provide individuals with a loan entitlement to the equivalent of four years of post-18 education to use over their lifetime. In response to this, many higher education providers will start to offer more discrete micro-credentials – small units of learning that can be delivered online or face-to-face – which are typically focussed on skills.
Could these also be part of flexible programmes? Yes, Stella Jones-Devitt, thinks so, but only when it fits and responds to student needs or future ambitions:
“We can introduce micro-credentials which can bring people into higher education who wouldn’t usually access it. But those people deserve the best quality, so we need to think about how micro-credentials can be really meaningful and can help them gain something. They can also be part of an immensely fulfilling curriculum, but I think the skill is also in the navigation, supporting students to know how and why they would want to access the skills available through micro-credentialling.”
Hidden needs and the hidden curriculum
For flexible learning to deliver on its ambitions of making HE more accessible to more students, it’s crucial to reflect on the needs of your learners. Some of those needs may not be immediately visible. Think about the real people behind the screen: some may not have a physical space from which they can easily attend synchronous sessions, some may lack the right tech, some may struggle to participate due to disability or neurodiversity. Kate Lindsay was keen to remind us to get to know our students,
There are ways of designing our online curriculum so it’s more accessible to more students. We need to reach through the screen and understand the circumstances of our students, so we can design for them.
Alongside the invisible needs of our learners, there are norms, practices and opportunities that some students pick up on and others are blind to. Understanding what has been hidden or even denied to some students such as careers services, academic skills support, pastoral care, social activities and more because they are only offered on campus in limited
time windows, makes you wonder who is benefiting from these? Often referred to as the ‘hidden curriculum’, find out if this support is offered in other, more flexible ways, don’t assume that your students know about these things and how to access them or understand why they should access them – signpost them from within your programme or module’s online space so that all students have this information.
Flexible assessment to match
As mentioned earlier, a truly flexible module or programme should have flexible assessment to match. That’s easier said than done, of course. The main challenge lies in rigid university or professional body assessment protocols which often stipulate that a minimum amount of credit must come from an end-of-course written exam.
However, you can look to design a range of assessment methods, such as portfolios and projects, that meet your course outcomes and provide a more authentic and flexible approach for students, this might help to mitigate some of the contract cheating that is also being widely spoken about in the sector too.. We appreciate that you’ll still need to go through validation. But if you carefully critique your assessment design and can clearly state how it demonstrates an individual’s achievement of the learning outcomes, there’s no reason why you should have to stick to a traditional written essays or exams.
As with the learning activities, consider students as co-creators of the assessment – students can be given the autonomy to negotiate assessment types and windows. Kate Lindsey suggests focusing on assessments through a different lens,
“Rather than necessarily focusing on how we can make our current university processes and systems more flexible, it’s about looking at the design of the assessment itself to make it more flexible, more supportive for students. For example, consider e-portfolios, project-based assessment or group projects. If we start to adopt more authentic, more flexible forms of assessment in themselves, I think that is the best way for us to support flexible education.”
Making it work
We started considering the tensions of the external push to get students back on campus versus students seeking more flexible learning opportunities. Knowing the impetus is there to move into a flexible learning future, how do we achieve that while not letting university’s expensive and extensive real estate go fallow?
Consider the buildings as part of the flexible repertoire. Open architectures such as cafes and libraries are great meeting places to share ideas and more welcoming for individual tutorials. Some students may want to be in a physical space with fellow students to join an online session, some will seek in-person social opportunities on campus between sessions.
There is still value in spaces designed for specific learning opportunities, whether it be an art studio with fantastic light, a laboratory with expensive kit or a mock court room with an innate sense of gravitas.Buildings themselves can provide learning opportunities and they can be repurposed, redesigned and deployed by universities for other initiatives within their wider community. Flexible doesn’t mean that you never use university buildings, it’s that you use them in different ways to enhance the learning that you’ve designed.The essence of flexibility is that one size doesn’t fit all, so consider your context as a whole when you design – your learners, your subject, your physical spaces, your online spaces and your social spaces.
In conclusion, flexible learning really does require flexible thinking, flexible design and flexible spaces.
Thanks to our panel of flexible learning experts for sharing the ideas in this blog:
Paula Shaw, Associate Professor of Online Teaching and Learning, University of Derby
Stella Jones-Devitt, Professor of Critical Pedagogy, Staffordshire University
Kate Lindsay, Head of Digital Education, University College of Estate Management
Anika Sharif, BSc Psychology student, University of Derby