Hybrid working: face-to-face or remote, the best practices matter
The health crisis that we’ve experienced has led to new educational practices. These new practices have yet to be formalised collectively and we can see that recently, many universities and schools have rolled out the digital and audiovisual tools required for this brutal and enforced change.
Yousense supports the roll out of educational tools, such as:
- In the General Medicine Department at the Université de Bourgogne, a studio was equipped with a Microsoft Teams Room solution for lecturers who provide “remote lectures” for 800 students connected remotely via Teams. The lecture is also screened via videoconferencing in three classrooms in Nevers. The Microsoft Teams Room solution provides the users (the lecturers) with the comfort of a traditional videoconferencing room in a Teams environment. The devices selected – camera, microphones, touchscreen tablet – from Bose, Sennheiser and Crestron, are certified by Microsoft.
- To enhance the teaching, which is also done in the form of “remote tutorials”, several classrooms and meeting rooms are equipped in BYOD (bring your own device) mode: the lecturer brings their own PC which serves (still in the Teams environment) as a codec for the web conference. To fulfil their mission, they only need to connect to the audio and video devices (Screen, camera, speakers) present in the room.
- Some lecture halls, where half of the students are present and the other half are attending remotely, on a rotating basis, are equipped with tracking cameras at the back of the lecture hall and high-performance ceiling microphones: this makes it possible to maintain contact and a link with the students, who are happy to be in a “real” classroom atmosphere and to provide the same teaching remotely with very good sound quality and a lecturer who always remains in the loop.
- A business school has also equipped 12 rooms for hybrid learning and a lecture hall for Teams Live Events for 10,000 students.
With the rapid roll out of these new innovative tools, it is clear that the challenge will not be for students, who are already very agile, to take on board these devices. They have largely taken them on board in their private and professional lives with working from home, the massive adoption of videoconferencing solutions like Zoom or Teams, shared conversations and document exchanges (WhatsApp, Onedrive, etc.).
From now on, the continuity of traditional tutorials, in lecture halls or in classrooms, can be completely carried out remotely!
The challenge for lecturers will be to include collaborative work in their learning, in addition to remote teaching: how to foster interaction with the students who are less present, how to recreate classes that have become virtual, how to use written chat tools for interaction, how to check active presence, etc.
Outside education and training institutions, students will need new educational reference points, particularly in terms of time and methodology, personalised feedback, and assessments of their learning to know where they stand, etc.
Concerning these tools, some already exist, some still to be invented, standardised or in any case validated!
This is a question of developing new systems and methods, which make extensive use of remote learning resources, without losing the irreplaceable resources and advantages of face-to-face teaching.
In this unprecedented situation that is shaking up education, UNESCO has just launched a “global coalition” to accelerate the implementation of remote learning for 850 million students, especially for those who, at the moment, do not have access to it: this is good news!
