In this episode, we discuss the unique opportunities for assessment in the HyFlex Course Model. Brian Beatty shares why he developed the model and how his classes have changed over time using the model.

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Dr. Brian Beatty is Professor of Instructional Technologies and co-coordinator of the Instructional Design and Technology MA program in the Department of Equity, Leadership Studies and Instructional Technologies at San Francisco State University. Brian’s primary areas of interest and research include social interaction in online learning, flipped classroom implementation, and developing instructional design theory for Hybrid-Flexible learning environments. At SFSU, Dr. Beatty pioneered the development and evaluation of the HyFlex course design model for blended learning environments, implementing a “student-directed-hybrid” approach to better support student learning.  

Previously (2012 – 2020), Brian was Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs Operations at San Francisco State University (SFSU), overseeing the Academic Technology unit and coordinating the use of technology in the academic programs across the university. He worked closely with IT professionals and leaders in other units to coordinate overall information technology strategic management at SFSU. Prior to 2012, Brian was Associate Professor and Chair of the Instructional Technologies department in the Graduate College of Education at SFSU. He received his Ph.D. in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University Bloomington in 2002. Dr. Beatty also holds several CA single-subject teaching credentials, an M.A. in Instructional Technologies from SF State and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Dr. Beatty has more than 30 years of experience as a classroom teacher, trainer, and instructional designer at schools, businesses, and the US Navy.

Bio and Photo From https://edtechbooks.org/user/170

Curfman, Caleb M   0:06
All right.
Well, welcome, Brian Beatty to this episode of Access without the stress, where we try to find ways to engage students, but also encourage and promote this engagement within our classes.
And one way that that really has come about for me personally is the work that I have done in the High Flex modality, which is why I wanted to invite you on so many of us are changing over using some form.
And I know a lot of faculty who are using what what we’ve been calling in our circle, kind of the Brian Beattie form.
In other words, the three specific modalities that a student can be, and I know there’s lots of different ways, but just to kind of frame the conversation we are looking at asynchronous completely asynchronous.
We are looking at students that can attend via zoom in our case or students that attend in person and giving the students all that choice.
And so, before we really begin, would you be willing to share just a brief introduction of kind of what got you into this type of teaching modality and and a little bit of your background in it before I start asking some more specific questions.

Brian (Guest)   1:23
Sure.
Well, thank you Caleb, for inviting me and thank you for to your audience for listening to the podcast.
I was an important thing.
You’re doing what I would call full on High flex.
Then all three modes.

Curfman, Caleb M   1:35
Yep.

Brian (Guest)   1:35
I don’t know that there’s another mode though, though.
Who knows with teaching and meta or some other virtual space coming down the road at some point?
Or maybe some IAI supported teaching?
Who knows what that might look like?
But right now, that’s basically what we’re able to do.
And and I’ve been teaching that way myself for a long time.
But I started just with a very simple approach to add in some students who could not be in a face to face classroom.
Who I wanted to have in my face to face classes.
And so how do I create a space for students at a distance or remote students or or online students in a face to face classroom and this this was a question that came down in my world in 2005 when we felt some pressure for enrollment in our degree program small degree program, slightly declining.
Let’s like everyone else at the time, and our department chair had the idea to create an online version of the of the.
Of the you know, basically flip online.
Let’s turn it into an online program, cause a lot of programs in our field, instructional systems, technology, instructional design and technology, et cetera.
We’re doing it at that time and the fact that we weren’t ready for that, we weren’t ready to take our face to face program.
We’ve been teaching and had students a 25 year history and they R in the region.
You know, that’s a pretty substantial history.
There’s a lot of lot of word of mouth and branding that goes along with it and we didn’t wanna just shove that aside for a fully online program that was untested, unproven, at least for us.
And we had no experience teaching fully online, most of us.
So I said, why don’t we?
Let’s look for a compromise.
What if we found a way to bring online students into our face to face courses we wouldn’t give up the on the face to face program.
We wouldn’t give up to face to face students, and yet we would accept the online students wherever they may be, and that was basically the birth of the idea for High Flex.
I looked around to see who’s doing this already.
I thought someone gotta be doing this already and I found solutions that were out there that were multimodal, so they had the remote students and they had and they had local students, but there was never any discussion of flexibility like students changing modes from from week to week or session to session.
That was new for us and so that’s why I came up with the term high flexed to basically a mash up for hybrid and flexible because I wanted to make sure people understood this is different than what we’ve done before.
It’s not just hybrid.
It’s not just a blend, it’s a blend or a hybrid.
That’s students are actually making the choice of when they’re going to be online and when they’re going to be face to face.
This was really important for us because we were not going to be going after a a remote population of students.
We wanna disturb students locally.
Who could not be in the classroom for whatever reason?
But who might be able to come to the classroom and then give our local students the option of also being online if they needed to be, or want it to be?
Because being in the classroom was gonna be difficult or impossible for them, you know, for a particular session or two.

Curfman, Caleb M   4:28
Yeah, I really like that because I did experience a class in undergrad where it was a composition class where you would spend OK Mondays.
We’re in person and then another class session or or Group B would be in person on Thursday or whatever it was, and that was a form of of hybrid which had some of that.

Brian (Guest)   4:49
M.

Curfman, Caleb M   4:50
But but I really like how you defined this new in in very intentional in this new change.

Brian (Guest)   4:57
Right.
Yes, if you’re talking about a classic hybrid, we do a lot of those on our campus and there’s some good reasons to do classic hybrids.
You can you can double up your space savings and things like that, but the challenge of course, is that students are still kind of stuck into the someone’s always telling me where to be and when to be there.
And you know, today my car won’t start or or whatever.
My my kids are sick.
My parents are sick.
I’m sick.
Whatever it might be, and the faculty has no idea about that, they can’t changed their plans just because you can’t either.
So my my my pitch to fact is let’s plan for for the alternative all the time, because someone’s always gonna need that kind of flexibility, that support.
And if we’ve designed and planned for it, we’re ready for it, then it’s not such a shock to us.
It doesn’t throw everything off because OK, I’ve only had five people in class instead of 10 or or what.
Have you kind of plan?
It’s like planning for contingencies all the time.
It’s very resilient form, of course designing I believe.

Curfman, Caleb M   5:53
Yeah.
And in terms of the course design, I’m going to link your book, the Open source book, as well as some other podcast you’ve been on talking about.
Specifically, the course design because I think that is such a valuable, important piece.
But one piece I want to pull out of that to really frame our conversation is the using the same objectives for all your students.
But specifically how you assess or develop an assessment plan for a high flex class.
A lot of my listeners have said how do I do this?
How do I do it if some students are online?
Some are in person.
If there’s a discussion online, do we have the students in person do it?
All those types of things.
And so would you be able to kind of walk us into a classroom a little bit of the high flex in terms of specifically assessment?

Brian (Guest)   6:44
Sure.
Sure.
Uh, that’s a great that’s a that’s a really important topic.
It’s one of the top two or three of the challenging areas when I work with faculty and instructional designers on on on, you know, building the first courses and developing kind of program approaches, assessment and engagement at the top two.
And then there’s workload, of course.
But assessment is always one of the top two as far as the course designing part of it, and I think there’s a couple of things to consider even before we jump into like some specifics, some specific strategies.
And that’s well when you say assessment, what do you mean, right?
We can talk about formal assessment learning assessment, which is what most of us are probably talking about, how well our students understanding and learning the content and being able to apply the principles in various ways do task, etcetera.
Kind of the Kirkpatrick’s level 2 and maybe even Level 3 right where we’re talking about learning and performance, right?
But there are other ways of thinking about that.
You know, one of them is the less formal assessment or the informal assessment.
How well are students able to self assess their own learning?
How well do they know how well they’re doing?
Kind of the on on my on my way towards learning, helping me self regulate, I need to know how well I’m doing and so that’s another kind of aspect of assessment that might be important to talk about.
And then there’s another third level, which I think goes at a kind of a higher level or like an outside level where when we are assessing our students the the measures that we use are sometimes being used by other people, right?
When we report something, someone’s using that data or could be using that data to say ohh look at let’s look at quality.
Let’s do some comparative studies.
Let’s look at student progress, towards degree etcetera and so assessment itself can be relatively complicated.
Probably what we’re talking about, though, is really student learning, right, which is where most of us start starting with I I think that my #1 guideline for this is trying to do a single form of assessment, at least the high level assessment that you know where you get your marks for the class from the same for all students.

Curfman, Caleb M   8:31
Yeah.

Brian (Guest)   8:47
And I say that because there I think there has to be a balance between the individual needs for flexibility for students in different modes, and they’re they’re equipage in those particular modes.
Uh, with the idea of the context around assessment really matters.
If I give students a test or a quiz in a classroom environment with me, they’re proctoring or my tas.
I never have teas, so I guess it would be me and then I give the same exact assessment in an online way to online, especially asynchronous students where nobody’s watching and no one’s proctoring them.
I can expect that there probably be some differences in the mean of those scores, right?
It’s it’s possible that some of the online students in an unproctored format might be using resources that students in the classroom are not using because they because maybe I told them not to right and and I’m there.

Curfman, Caleb M   9:36
Umm.

Brian (Guest)   9:37
So they’re gonna respect my wishes and that thing.
And so that’s a problem when you have that context difference, because now you’re gonna get scores that are different based on mode and you’re not kind of covering for that.
The students who are doing it online might get better scores.
Not because they necessarily know more, but because they have a better access to resources.
So I think that what we should do is find a form of assessment that’s consistent in my world.
That typically means out of class or online assessments, because the online students, if you’re gonna have an online asynchronous path, they’re probably not going to be able to come into the classroom for assessments.
They may be able to on A1 or once or twice a semester if you tell them ahead of time and they know they’re signing up for that.
But like on a on a weekly basis or a unit basis, not not possible really.
And So what we meet, what that means is that we kind of have to move things into their environment, which is typically out of class.
You can call it online if you want, but it really means out of the classroom environment, right?
Not synchronous, and they do it at their own time.
So which means that we would then design them for that kind of situation.
It could still be proctored.
Some campuses will use a third party proctoring or the OR the faculty guarantee A is doing online test proctoring on our campus.
We don’t do very much of that.
As a matter of fact, we’re not really allowed to do third party proctoring for classes because of, you know, some of the consequences are implications of that cost and other factors.
So what we do is we redesign tests and quizzes so that we know, hey, this is gonna be essentially an open book.
And so we write questions that require them to apply it in particular ways.
And so we get.
I think we get better assessment from that perspective.
That doesn’t mean we can also do the kind of basic facts and concepts kinds of quizzing.
But now we’re gonna probably design those so that you can take this multiple times.
We’re gonna take your best score.
We want you to recognize these terms.
We want you to be able to recall these simple definitions because it’s important for a baseline level of knowledge, and it doesn’t matter if it takes you three times to do this or five times to do this or 10 times.
To do this, we’re gonna randomize the questions and kind of scramble them up.
So it’s not gonna be just a road exercise and, you know, remembering a pattern of numbers and letters so that that’s probably my most important guidance.
Now, along with that is a shift from testing, quizzing.
Kind of assessments to more authentic assessments where students are actually producing something that’s relevant to what they’re learning.
Is it a sort of an analysis of a of a poem or a historical analysis of some situation, or they’re doing a professional style presentation for a business class?
Or, you know, in a teacher prep program, they’re going to create a Lesson plan.
They’re going to deliver a Lesson plan, whatever it might be, but things that are more relevant to what they actually want to learn to actually give them a chance to show I’m learning things that matter to me and my field of study.
And two, maybe I’m building a portfolio as I go.
And so all of those things kind of kind of go into this.
And so that’s my long winded initial response to your question there, Caleb.

Curfman, Caleb M   12:30
Yeah.
No, that’s that’s awesome.
That that really hit a lot of the important pieces, starting with the idea of, you know, what assessment level are we looking at right.
And and and.
I really appreciate you identifying those three main ways.
We look at this and for as far as the questions I usually get from listeners, it is definitely the assessment of learning and and how do we how do we do this?
And I really like that whole concept of let’s bring it out of class.
Let’s have it out of class time because that class time is going to change a lot in a High Flex mode, and you know, being that I’ve I’ve taught it for a few years now, that class time really becomes a time to hone in on some of the things I’ve been seeing in the online or out of campus time, whether it’s discussions and other places.
And so you really are describing a lot of formative assessment in in some of that.
But I really like that you also highlight those larger assignments being more authentic and you even threw in some retrieval practice ideas of multiple quizzes.
I think what you’re really doing is blending the best of both worlds as far as assessment goes of students.
What we’ve learned science of teaching and learning lately.
And so that’s that’s really a nice connection.
So to bounce off that a little bit, you talk a little bit about in class and what you’re doing in class, uh, how have you structured that class time differently in a high flex setting to maybe do some of that formative assessment that you don’t necessarily get always in the online class?

Brian (Guest)   14:16
Yeah, that’s a great question.
Umm and I, I will.
I readily admit that my approach towards the class, the synchronous parts of my hyflex classes, is a little different and it’s changed over time.
I teach.
I teach those classes very differently than I did when I first started, in part because what I’ve what I’ve learned is that there is no pure single mode.
Almost of anything anymore.
Maybe asynchronous online is probably the kind of the cleanest one without getting too much into synchronous.
Although we’re using recordings from synchronous sessions, I encourage my online asynchronous students to sign up for synchronous meetings with me on a regular or or whatever is and as needed basis.
So there’s some of that going in there, but there’s more on the other side of this where there’s no, there’s no pure classroom, only kind of experience anymore.
I don’t think so, at least not in higher education and in the in the context we work in, because all of it uses some online, some a lot of online it.
Same thing for synchronous synchronous online.
You know, there it doesn’t like usually dabble into the classroom, but there’s still a lot of asynchronous online components to all that, that whole learning experience.
So what that means to me is that I feel I have a lot of freedom and so some extent responsibility to leverage the asynchronous space for my synchronous students as well because it’s good learning time to expect them to do all their learning in a two or three hour period in a in a week and then do this for like 12 or 15 weeks just to you know, that’s kind of like ridiculous, although we kind of some of our some of our system kind of expects that.
So what I’ve done is I’ve taken that three hours a week, require time, and I’ve shaved off an hour of that to go down to two hours in the synchronous session and then taking that rest of that time and spun that into the online space, the asynchronous space for my face to face students and for my synchronous online students.
I’ve talked with my.
AVP’s at the university, who are in charge of assessment to make sure they knew what I was doing.
Why I was doing it and I have their had their concurrence right.
We were, we were meeting our contact hour requirements because when I require them to do asynchronous online discussions, I’m there with them.
So it’s contact time with me.
I regularly am in the forums and I have all of my students doing those online forums and that’s a form of me assessing their learning, especially formatively because when they’re putting their their words out there, their ideas I can put mine out there with them.
I can, you know, shift and adjust and and maybe correct or maybe expand upon or or draw them out even more to help them explain what they’re, you know, develop their own understanding that way.
So that’s a that’s a really interesting a way of looking at assessment because it’s really you could think of this as an engagement activity.
It’s also a content generation activity, and it’s also an assessment activity kind of hits the magic there of three of the main kind of design aspects of what we’re usually talking about that.
So the classroom is shorter.
It’s a little bit more interactive than it used to be, and when I do interactive elements in the class, it’s always about having them.
Kind of reveal their understanding in some way, so it’s all about formative assessment.
It’s also about engagement, and it’s also about, you know, using or generating content as we go.
I never thought like that before when I was just teaching in the classroom.
I think my classes are a lot more interactive.
There are a lot more kind of fast paced as you will and I feel like uh, it’s a lot more fun for me to teach that way.
You know than it was OK.
I’ve got 3 hours to fill on Monday night.
I would, you know, three hours is a long time.
K gotta build 1/2 hour break and somewhere maybe you know you know that that kind of thing.
Now, there’s not enough time.

Curfman, Caleb M   18:02
Yeah.

Brian (Guest)   18:02
I we we have that a whole online space throughout the week that we use quite a bit.

Curfman, Caleb M   18:07
Yeah.
And.
And that’s really interesting because I noticed the same thing my classes prior to doing the High Flex.
It was a little more traditional, if you will, and it it felt like we never really knew exactly where we were going and and I would have a plan.
But but what I really like about this is I don’t have to take so much time to bring us back into the learning.
That’s something I notice is now when we have the asynchronous discussion going, it’s not like I have to OK remember what we did on Monday.
We were talking about this so and and reframing the whole thing.
And so that has been an experience I’ve shared of of connecting with it in that way and and having that ability to have the ongoing learning and I think personally the workload has gone down a little bit for students because they’re kind of just chipping away as the week goes on instead of trying to condense all that.

Brian (Guest)   19:02
Umm.

Curfman, Caleb M   19:04
And so I really like how you how you bring that up.
And you mentioned discussions and that’s probably the biggest one that comes up with a lot of the faculty I work with.
Is this question of how do we run a discussion in an asynchronous or in in a High Flex class and and it’s what I’ve heard here.
Kind of.
The two modes, and I’m curious what your thoughts are.
The one mode I’ve heard is having students in our in person synchronous time or on zoom.
Do some think pair share type activities.
Some things in the classroom build out a document of some sort and then share that with the online class.
Uh, and they would react with it, responded with it some way the other way.
I’ve heard about this is not having as much of that in class discussion and instead kind of pushing that into the offline or off campus discussions entirely.
And maybe the things that are done in the classroom, they’re left a little more to the classroom.
Those are kind of the two I’ve heard.
So what?
What are some of your thoughts or reactions to that?

Brian (Guest)   20:14
Well, yeah.
Thanks for the opportunity for me to react because I I wanna react to that.
I can certainly understand those various perspectives.
I think there are some other ways to think about this though, and here.
Here’s here’s one thing that’s that’s really important, I think, is that the in class discussion, the synchronous discussion actually zoom zoom is very close to the in class in some ways on this because of the synchronicity, that’s a very different discussion than the asynchronous online discussion they they are both discussions.

Curfman, Caleb M   20:41
Yes.

Brian (Guest)   20:43
They could have the exactly the same topic, but the the level of thinking and the level of understanding that becomes.
That’s part of that conversation is very different in class.
It’s much more dynamic.
It’s very high dialogue, a lot of back and forth people who thrive in that environment.
Love those examples?
I would not want to keep my students who are choosing to be synchronous to to not have the opportunity for discussion because many of them really enjoy that and I enjoy that myself.
As a matter of fact, and yet I also don’t want them to be thinking that’s all there is for discussion because the asynchronous online discussion that’s it’s kind of like more like a homework assignment where you’re thinking more about something in applying it in a deeper way and then sharing those ideas and then reacting to the reactions of your colleagues as well as reacting to their sharing of their deeper ideas.
So I’d like to do both.
That’s why I take the time to take some time away from the the synchronous in in and devote that to asynchronous discussion space.
I wouldn’t want to do either or.
I wanna do both.
I was doing either or for a long time and I you know the in class discussions were OK, but the problem I found was that even with my mature students, I could not get all of them to prepare well for class.
And so the application oriented discussions I wanted to have could rarely have those discussions because they just weren’t ready for them.
We were always kind of stuck on the basics.
Good stuff.
I mean, they had a lot of interesting questions, but we never got to that level and.
But so now what I do is I really I I realize there are still coming to class that way and so we we focus the classroom discussion, the synchronous discussion on probably the simpler topics we might dabble with some application things, but we’re not focused on that.
The application discussion is focused in my classes is in the asynchronous space.
Those online students, the the online asynchronous spaces I expect them to watch the recording or the elements of the recording we add for them or maybe read a transcript so they get some of those basic questions explained.
If they have questions and then they focus on the application and then the synchronous students they’re taking what they’ve learned in the classroom and now they’re going to try to apply more of it, hopefully in a longer term, you know, maybe it’s a project orientation or whatever it might be, but they do that then then the asynchronous discussions.
So I do both.
I don’t wanna do either or because because neither one, neither you know they both have reasons to be right.
Why not do both?
If we can do both and I find that most of my students are doing both.
Uh, they seem and and the other thing I’ll say is that when we do the in class discussions, I always I try to do them very interactively.
And so there’s usually an opportunity for using some sort of interactive tool like a mentimeter or some other polling tool.
And then I, about two years ago, I realized I could actually write these so that they’re also effective for the asynchronous students cuz so I use them synchronously in class, students are interacting and they’re answering questions and they’re leaving comments etcetera.
And then after class ends, I changed that to like audience paste and uh so that the asynchronous nurse can come back in, listen to the recording and then answer those questions themselves as they listen to the recording while they’re seeing it on the screen.
Well, what would you say?
Boom.
That tool is available for them and so that makes that gives them another reason to watch the video and also another reason to engage.
Oh no, by the way, they get like 10% of their grade for showing me that they’re leaving a trace.
And then when we do our breakout discussions in the synchronous space, I try to do one of those hopefully every week at least one we we’re we’re taking notes, we’re creating some some summary of what we’re doing, the asynchronous learners, their task is to come back in there, add their own notes and their name to assign know they were there as a way of also kind of bringing them back into the synchronous discussion.
It’s not.
It’s not really bringing them in, but it’s it’s going in that direction to kind of make that connection and then and then we kind of all wrap it all up together in the asynchronous online discussion, which we then do a short debrief of at the beginning of the next synchronous session.

Curfman, Caleb M   24:45
Yeah.
OK, that that is very helpful and I’m glad I I saw it in your face that you wanted to respond to that I that was good.
I know you know what, listeners, you’re not obviously watching our our video, but that is one of those things that I’ve heard a lot of question about.
And I had the same reaction you did.
There’s such different experiences that and the other part of it is students are choosing to have those engagements right, whether it’s choosing to be in person, they don’t want to be doing a extremely long application discussion where they’re almost working on their own in class.

Brian (Guest)   25:07
Right.

Curfman, Caleb M   25:24
They want to have those moments to feel comfortable, so I really like that.

Brian (Guest)   25:29
Right.

Curfman, Caleb M   25:29
And another thing you said that that was interesting, there is bringing it all together with participation in the grade.
That’s kind of the other thing I hear a lot of of how do you, you know, make sure things are watched or used.

Brian (Guest)   25:44
Right.

Curfman, Caleb M   25:46
And so I like that.
You you do have some of those ways.
I also use mentee and that that is a nice way to engage.
So is that kind of how a lot of that is, it’s basically a participation piece with that in person aspect?

Brian (Guest)   26:00
Yeah.
What?
What?
Yeah.
What we do is I give them.
There’s usually three or maybe 4 aspects to a participation grade in my class, and each each each aspects worth at least 10% of their grade.
So it’s substantial, right?
So if they want an A or B in in a class like mine and they all want A or B’s it where I’m teaching they have to do this stuff and so one of them is active participation in the online discussion outside of class and that’s I don’t grade them for the content necessarily.
We have expectations for content and there’s a bit of a peer pressure around that.

Curfman, Caleb M   26:33
Yeah.

Brian (Guest)   26:34
Umm, but they get they I you know I want four posts.
I want, you know, you know, kind of in like, an original ish post and three substantial replies.
And so they get credit.
They get 10% of their grade if they do four of those four posts every week.
I also have them do this goes to the element of reflection or assessment as well as I do have them do what I call a reflection post every week and this is for formative assessment for me.
I tell them in this post, I want you to talk about how you’re learning your progress, your process.
I don’t care about.
Don’t talk about what you’re learning unless you really want to.
I’m not asking you content questions.
I wanna know process how’s it going?
Is this working out well?
Do you have any suggestions?
Those kinds of things.
And so that’s I treat that like an open journal.
So it’s a discussion forum.
They start their own thread and they reply to their own thread every week.
You know, for however long the semester, and that’s another 10% of their grade and another 10% of their grade is they show up for the synchronous session and they interact in it right.
They can’t just show up and you know black box on zoom and they never talk.

Curfman, Caleb M   27:33
Umm.

Brian (Guest)   27:34
Not gonna work.
You’re not as you’re not a synchronous student.
This week, you’re gonna be an asynchronous student.
If you want credit, but that’s another 10% of your grade.
And if you’re the they’re the asynchronous students.
Unfortunately, the way we have zoom interact in in, in, in working with our Canvas LMS first year out of the box on this I can’t see who actually watched this recording.
So that’s one of the reasons why I say, well, while you’re watching the recording, go to this Google doc we use during the recording and add your comments and put your name there.
So I know you were there or work on do the mentimeter like we did the mentee application and then put your name like the last slide is OK.
Add your name here if you want credit for being here with that kind of thing, that’s another 10% of their grade and so uh, that’s 30% right there.
That’s typically how I kind of split that out that way they’re participating, they’re they’re doing most of them, almost all of them are doing the formative assessment pieces and then we all get, you know, I get to, you know, teach them better from that and hopefully they get to learn a little bit better.

Curfman, Caleb M   28:33
Yeah.
No, that is really, really helpful.
So thank you for kind of spelling that out and and letting us kind of step into that classroom because it’s, it’s one thing to hear the concept.
Understand.
Ohh OK, I see how we put these three things together, but to actually ask those questions about assessment, I’ll tell you that was my biggest challenge when I when I went over to it was how do I do this in a way that is equivalent, but also in a way that isn’t going to make any one group feel like they’re doing too much work over another and and that that really spells it out nicely by just make it simple.

Brian (Guest)   29:06
Right.

Curfman, Caleb M   29:11
Make it 1 way and have everybody engage in that way and and work in that way.
So that is very helpful.

Brian (Guest)   29:18
Yeah.
And I I think it’s very important that students don’t get the impression that the easy path through this class is asynchronous online because all I have to do is I don’t know read something post post a couple of paragraphs and I’m done for the week.
Uh, that’s that.
That’s one of the design situations where you find all of these students who don’t seem to be that interested in learning, gravitating towards asynchronous online.
Why?
Because they think it’s an easy path.
That’s a design problem.
First off, I think.

Curfman, Caleb M   29:47
Yeah, for sure.
Well, we could talk for a very long time about this.
This is obviously a a huge passion of yours and a major interest of mine, but I do wanna highlight something that you are doing that definitely helped me personally with this and that was I attended one of your sessions one of your week long sessions that you do in the summer.
Would you be willing to just share a little bit about what that is?
And then as we kind of start to wrap up some of your information about where we can contact you other information.

Brian (Guest)   30:20
Right.
Yeah.
So what we’ve been doing in the High Flex learning community for the last few years is offering workshops for anyone who wants to be part of them.
You can register online at.
If you go to highflexlearning.org and search for workshops, you’ll find information about it.
We’re doing them right now two or three times a year.
The last one we just wrapped up in early, earlier in June and typically we do this in a week long.
We have a session every day, an optional live session for an hour and a half or so.
It’s all recorded.
There’s a there’s kind of a robust workshop site that has online discussions as part of it, and not surprisingly, and in students or participants go through that in a week.
They can get some digital badges if they want, and basically what we walk through is the design process, the power of that is not only the content and the opportunity to talk about it, but also the challenge to, OK, apply this to one of your courses.
So by the end of the week or at the end of the workshop, uh, hopefully you’ve got a design plan for one of your courses that’s not high flex yet.
Sometimes we’ll we’ll do this for for college cohorts when they wanna do a whole group of, you know, 15 or 2020 faculty or designers.
And sometimes we’ll spread it out over a month as well.
So not necessarily all in a week, but we found with people for professional development like in the summer and again in the winter session that week.
Long aspect is a you know, let’s let’s focus on this for a week.
Let’s get a jump start towards their first design and let’s you know, let’s let’s get it done.
So we can, you know, kind of move on to the actual design phase.

Curfman, Caleb M   31:53
Yeah.
And and and a bonus to that is you do it in a High Flex format, and so you you are modeling and and that’s really what was was really beneficial for me was you modeled it so that way I could.

Brian (Guest)   32:00
Right.

Curfman, Caleb M   32:07
I tried it out in the different ways I tried it out by responding right away in the discussion and then I thought, well, what happens if I watch the recording and and how do I feel different as a learner and I think seeing it from a learner perspective was one of the most beneficial things for me.

Brian (Guest)   32:19
Umm.

Curfman, Caleb M   32:24
Like you said, we getting it all ready getting these tools, but it’s kind of the learning within the learning by by seeing it.

Brian (Guest)   32:31
Right.
Yeah, we love to do.
We’d love to model what we’re talking about in faculty development when we, when we did A and in Person Workshop for high flux many years ago here we decided, well, we’re gonna force them all into the various modes.
So they get a chance to see part of the workshop in persons part of the workshop online asynchronously and part of the workshop synchronously.
Now we’re not doing face to face for the High Flex learning, uh, organization, High Flex learning community workshops because we don’t have the location right.

Curfman, Caleb M   33:04
Yeah.

Brian (Guest)   33:04
But we’re doing flexible.
The flexibility part of it online synchronous or asynchronous, are usually when people are doing a combination of both and all the resources remain available for probably up to a year until the recordings roll off the whoever storing them so so there’s an opportunity for that, that idea for performance support as well, right?

Curfman, Caleb M   33:17
Yeah.

Brian (Guest)   33:23
You know, I remember we talked about this three months ago.
Let me go see what that was about again and it’s all there still.

Curfman, Caleb M   33:29
Yeah.
Fantastic.
Well, thank you so much.
How can people reach you if they want to ask you questions?
Learn more about this.

Brian (Guest)   33:38
Yeah, probably the best way.
I mean I I’m an old.
I’m an old person, older person and so I still read and respond to email every day, and so you can get a hold of me at umm what’s the best one?
High flex learning@gmail.com.
That’s probably the best way.
You can also find me through my academic work at San Francisco state BJ Beatty at sfsu.edu.

Curfman, Caleb M   34:02
Fantastic.
Well, thank you so much and it has been a a pleasure to to really break this down.
Like I said, it’s.
I’m happy to say it seems like High Flex is becoming more popular as far as people are starting to know what it is.
A few years later, right.
And you’ve been doing this for quite a while, but it seems like it’s it’s gained a lot of traction.
Obviously, the pandemic added to that, but even before that, this need to bring students and be where students are and so happy to be hearing all of this and and getting that chance to look into your class and to kind of pick your brain on some of the the finer details of assessment.
And so thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to more conversations with you.
I know this is an ongoing community.
I’m part of the High Flex community, so we can we can talk there and and learn more about that, but thank you so much for joining me today.

Brian (Guest)   34:58
All right.
Thank you, Caleb.

Curfman, Caleb M   34:59
Yep, bye.