Facilitating blended synchronous learning

Blended synchronous learning (BSL) refers to a modality where the same learning activities are experienced by students on-campus and remote students within a single group and at the same time. For example, a seminar where some students are present in a physical teaching space on-campus, while others join in remotely via Zoom or another conferencing tool.

BSL activities offer the campus-based and remote students a simultaneous learning experience.

Professional development for BSL teaching staff

Teaching teams using BSL-enabled spaces are strongly encouraged to make use of the various professional development, technical training and self-service resources available. Feedback from early adopters of BSL highlighted the learning curve for teaching staff, and the great utility of the below supports and resources in helping BSL teaching teams to adapt to this new modality.

BSL training sessions

BSL pedagogy workshops and BSL drop-ins will be scheduled prior to the start of the semester.

BSL pedagogy workshops are delivered by learning designers and include approaches to designing activities for BSL sessions and tips to effectively bring together the 'Zoomies' (remote students) and the 'Roomies' (in-class students).

BSL drop-ins will be  delivered  by Field Services, with learning designers  attending  Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Staff can become familiar with the room  technology  and ask questions about their situation.

Check our workshop schedule for upcoming sessions.

MCSHE professional development offerings

MCSHE is offering a range of BSL and dual delivery professional development workshops for academic staff. See the full schedule of workshops and events.

Technical training for BSL teaching staff

BSL room inductions for each BSL subject's teaching team

Field Services will email each BSL subject coordinator 2-3 weeks out from their BSL teaching to schedule an induction for the whole teaching team in the BSL-enabled room they’re timetabled into.

If you’re a subject coordinator who is already less than two weeks away from teaching a BSL session and you haven’t heard from Field Services, you can log a request in Service Now, noting the subject code and the space you’re timetabled into.

Side-by-side, in-room technical support

Following the room inductions, Field Service agents will be available as roaming support for quick response on request to support you through the first few BSL classes to provide you with in-room technical advice and support.

The Field Services agent is not present to moderate Zoom chats or take the role of teaching assistant.

Top up technical support

If additional side-by-side, in-room support or room inductions are required (for instance, if a guest lecturer is running a BSL activity and they missed the initial training and induction), top up support from Field Services may be requested via Service Now.

Video guides

For access to individual room quick reference guides see blended synchronous learning - enabled spaces and quick reference guides

To facilitate BSL, technology can be used to offer an equitable experience to both campus-based and remote students. The University is upgrading a number of teaching spaces to help staff achieve effective BSL. The central timetabling team will endeavour to prioritise classes that have been nominated as BSL mode into suitably equipped spaces.

In most small-size classes the learning activities and the technology can be managed by one teaching staff member. However, in larger-size classes it is beneficial to have a more than one member of staff so that the contributions and activities of remote students can be supervised and teaching roles can be distributed. Faculties have been provided guidance on appropriate additional teaching assistance for these scenarios and subject coordinators should refer any questions to their senior colleagues responsible for teaching and learning in their faculty or graduate school.

In planning your blended synchronous classes you should consider:

• What activities can best be achieved pre- and post-class; it may be possible to ‘flip’ content delivery and focus upon interaction and collaboration during class time (e.g. any demonstrations could be pre-recorded and reused in the future).
• Taking a 'remote students first' approach by designing activities with remote students as your primary target – if these activities work for remote students, they are also likely to work for campus-based students.
• What level of connectivity and device access your students have. It is useful to carefully consider and be explicit with your students about the minimum technology that is required for your students to access and engage in your learning activities.
• Keeping your campus-based and remote interactions as simple as possible, without requiring specialist software or high bandwidth connectivity.
• Using the LMS as the core technology that links you to your remote and campus-based students.
• That students may be studying in multiple time zones and this may impact on their access and engagement in class. Timetabling won’t necessarily be able to take account of time zones and hence, you should make sure remote students in significantly different time zones are aware of the implications.

The following pages introduce blended synchronous learning (BSL) activities and will assist you in implementing these activities in your BSL lesson plans.

It is highly recommended to provide student guidance in your LMS subject on the necessary student-facing information and guides on any specific online tools that will be used in your BSL sessions. This is a requirement for the recipients of the Designing BSL Sessions LTI. The student LMS guides page is a good start and there are guides for every solution in the University’s online toolkit.

Furthermore, as students may not be familiar with dual delivery it is also important to clarify what this means for them. To assist you with this step import the dual delivery welcome page from Commons. To do this, go to the Commons link on the left-hand side menu in the LMS and use the search function to search for ‘Welcome information for students in dual delivery’.

BSL sessions can be recorded via Zoom. This method captures all the channels within the Zoom session i.e. remote students, classroom activities and cameras. Read instructions on setting this up. Because staff will log onto Zoom in the teaching space using their own credentials, the Zoom settings are inherited from the individual’s own account. Following the instructions above, it is recommended that the BSL session Zoom recording be saved to the University’s cloud storage through the appropriate setting in the Zoom account. This will ensure the recording is securely stored. A link and associated password will be emailed to the staff member. .

For the best student experience and control over the content, it is advised to download the recording, upload it to Echo360/Lecture Capture and make available through the LMS. Alternatively, a link to the Zoom recording can posted to the LMS directly.

Seminars

Student or expert seminars can be simply facilitated using a Zoom meeting with the campus-based class viewing the meeting on a large screen while remote viewers or presenters connect to the Zoom meeting on their own devices.

Discussions

Full class live discussions can be facilitated as per the seminars above – with the use of a roving microphone to pass around the campus-based participants. Small group discussions between campus-based and remote participants could be facilitated via assigning a campus-based student in each group to connect with the remote students using  Zoom.

Inquiry-based learning

Live project-based work between campus-based and remote students can be facilitated by online collaborative platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom Whiteboard (option in Zoom screen sharing).

Studio or performance-based learning

Staff can share a video of a performance or studio via Zoom from the campus-based environment that has filmed on a mobile devices. Then use the Zoom Chat to discuss a performance or studio.

For live streaming, staff can also use the live streaming option in Universal Capture. This lets you stream video and audio or just audio to the Lecture Capture system. From a device, students can access Lecture Capture in the LMS subject and view the live stream. There is also the option to discuss the live stream using the Lecture Capture discussion tool while viewing the live stream. This discussion can be time stamped to relevant points in the live stream.

There are a range of advanced technical solutions for specific learning situations. Read more about possible teaching and learning scenarios where these advanced solutions may be appropriate and a discussion of their use.