The Effectiveness of Hybrid Solutions in Higher Education: A Call for Hybrid-Teaching Instructional Design

In order to design learning solutions that effectively embed face-to-face and online dimensions, it is crucial to identify the key components underpinning hybrid solutions. Furthermore, once these components have been identified, there is the need to clarify how to recombine them to meet a specific learning objective. The paper aims to highlight the role of network and mobile technologies (NMTs) in enhancing the particular characteristics of hybrid solutions (HS) with a view to (a) potentiating/enriching the teaching/learning processes, (b) exploiting the varied opportunities it offers for their observability, and hence for their monitoring addressed to formative and summative assessment. The article will emphasize how this potential can only be captured by solidly integrating the process of teaching/learning design with that of monitoring and assessment. After a brief overview of hybrid solutions in higher education, a possible breakdown of HS into its key dimensions (onsite/online/individual/collaborative learning) will be proposed. The aims is to understand how the characteristics of those dimensions can be used to enrich/potentiate both the teaching/learning and the assessment processes. The role of NMTs in supporting and fully exploiting the special features of HS will be explored using concrete examples. The third part of the article will address the question of how to combine and/or use singly the various components of HS, providing guidelines for applying the HS dimensions to the specific goals of the teaching path and to the activities which are functional to the achievement of learning goals. To conclude, the emerging contexts and evolutionary models of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) will be discussed as an example in line with the proposed HS model. Keywords: hybrid learning; network and mobile technologies; assessment; collaborative learning; instructional design; university teaching.