With the rapid switching between group discussion phases and feedback phases in plenum, there were a lot of technical settings to be constantly managed. I also needed to repeat what the students in the classroom were saying so that the people at home would hear. It was certainly difficult to always be aware of what the two groups were seeing and hearing – whether I was sharing my screen correctly with just the on-site class, or with the online participants as well, whether the people at home could actually hear me, and whether I could hear them if they tried to say something. In the seminars, however, we actually tried to do all of these things because the groups were smaller and more manageable. Lecturer and Head Innovative Teaching and Learning Unit at the IUED Institute of Translation and Interpreting I would certainly have struggled with asking the on-site group to talk with a partner and putting the online groups into breakout groups, all while monitoring and participating in a chat stream. I was convinced that, both technically and cognitively, I would otherwise have had trouble answering questions from the online group and the group attending in person at the same time. In the lectures, I decided to tell the students from the start that the online group would be just watching the lesson and would not be able to actively participate. One of the things that I was concerned about was whether I was able to cognitively manage two separate groups at once. Nevertheless, we set forth on this venture with some trepidation. Due to this lecture/seminar format, and considering the resources already available, this course seemed to be a good candidate for a hybrid* classroom pilot in the BA in Applied Languages. Over the past two years, I had also made videos of the lectures for the online semesters. The course had already been developed and implemented as a blended learning course, with lots of asynchronous online practice each week. Students attended a traditional lecture, where they received input on the analytical framework of grammar, and accompanying seminars, where they applied this framework to language analysis. The course that we chose for our pilot was a first semester analytical grammar course. Did the extended offering help the students with their learning, or did it undermine the building of a learning community? Why did students choose to follow online or on-site? What were the advantages and disadvantages of each setting? At the end of it, they asked students about their experiences in this hybrid mode. It was necessary to enable all students to continue following their studies – but how can this be done without compromising the quality of teaching and learning for all students? Would offering a live-stream for lectures and seminars actually work? Morgan Kavanagh and Paul Kelly embarked on a pilot project to offer their first semester grammar course in the BA in Applied Languages through a variety of channels – on-site, online with live-stream and through pre-recorded lectures. ![]() In the autumn semester of 2021, students and teachers at the ZHAW’s Institute of Translation and Interpreting were faced with a new challenge – teaching occurred on-site, but access to the physical classrooms was restricted for some due to COVID-certification requirements or individual health concerns.
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