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By Trudy Brown
As flexible and hyflex courses become more popular at colleges and universities around the country, Davidson-Davie Community College has also added Flexible courses (also called Flex and F Sections) as a new designation to our offerings. These Flex courses will have a face-to-face component as well as at least one online component (either online asynchronous and/or virtual).
Despite the proliferation of this type of format in recent years, little research has been done on the methods, best practices, and needs of flexible format courses. To learn more about how these courses are being conducted at DDCC and how they are different from other formats, Lucy Phelps and I will be talking to instructors here who are teaching Flex courses. Last week we met with Gerald Bosch, Pat Bower, Gary Bowers, Michael Liu, and Pam Vest who gave us some insight into how they manage this challenging format. Most of these instructors have students who meet in all three modalities for any given class meeting, though some also have designated in-person days where all students are expected to attend.
If that sounds like quite a juggling act, I would agree with you, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear several of these instructors say that they actually really enjoy and prefer this course format to others that they have taught. After hearing about what these instructors are doing, I am looking forward to learning more throughout this semester about the innovative ways that these instructors are interacting with students in their Flex courses, as well as hearing about the challenges they have and learning how we can support these types of courses better.
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