According to NCCU CIO Leah Kraus, the school now widely uses tech tools such as the video conferencing platform Webex from tech company Cisco to deliver course content in person and virtually, and for events such as hybrid homecoming celebrations, student club meetings and faculty meetings. She said the school’s approach to hybrid living to maintain student engagement aims to boost student and faculty retention as people become more accustomed to telework and virtual learning.
“I truly believe that beyond hybrid learning, we’re really in a chapter of hybrid living. At the beginning of the pandemic, we were trying to answer, how can we use technology to deliver the same level of programming both inside and outside of the classroom and administratively? The idea of community at an HBCU [historically black college or university], at minority-serving campuses or smaller campuses in general, is different than on a large campus, and it was crucial to keep up the high-touch engagement,” she said in a recent blog post for Cisco. “Many university leadership and emergency-management team meetings are held over Webex. At the beginning of the school year, when monkeypox started causing concern, we were able to maintain important campus town halls remotely. For NCCU, we’re not going backwards on hybrid. We’re going to keep moving forward and fully utilize the benefits of technology.”
Kraus said that the university already had a degree of familiarity with hybrid models and tools such as Webex prior to the pandemic, which helped make the shift smoother than many other institutions that had to quickly adapt to the need for virtual learning early in the pandemic.
“We have a very strong network infrastructure built on Cisco that we had prior to our pivot in 2020, and that allowed us to be ready for the pivot. We have a strong infrastructure, and we already had tools — specifically Webex — in place, so we were able to capitalize on that,” she told Government Technology. “We’ve hosted town halls to address the changes that have had to take place over the course of the years, and those were taking place prior to the pivot, but what we’ve seen is our ability to hold the town halls and, interestingly, stream the town halls to Facebook and other social networking. That allows the students and the parents to get information at the same time.”
According to Kraus, the goal has largely been to embrace hybrid campus living, much like how institutions came to embrace learning management systems that are now commonplace at campuses across the U.S.
“There was a time when a learning management system was a crazy idea, that every course had to have a syllabus in the learning management system, and every course had to have some components where students could get the information as they needed it,” she said, adding that the university’s criminal justice program recently moved to a fully HyFlex model.
“Even if the course isn’t necessarily 100 percent HyFlex, we have many faculty using technology like this as a classroom capture,” she said. “We used to invest thousands and thousands of dollars in classroom capture, and now you turn on Webex and you’re automatically getting the classroom capture, so I think this is seen as another tool in the faculty member’s toolkit. Our responsibility is making sure that the faculty understand how best to use that with their courses and for their pedagogy styles.”
Kraus said the university plans to continue using the model to give students more flexibility about when and how to attend courses and events as the university gets increasingly comfortable with the hybrid living model.
“What we learned over the course of that two years really is that students wanted to continue having the flexibility of getting some things through this hybrid mode we’re currently using,” she said. “As an HBCU, our in-person programming is incredibly important, and we were able to maintain that even when we were in the biggest of pivots in 2020. We were able to host exercise classes, yoga classes, listening sessions and conversation sessions. Our rec center held classes using technology, so all of that was taking place. … What we are seeing is we need to be able to continue to offer that.”
While universities across the U.S. are each at their own stages of implementing hybrid learning models, Gary DePreta, Cisco’s vice president for U.S. state and local government and education, believes the emerging practice will become commonplace in higher education to meet student and faculty demands for flexibility, and to boost student participation.
“There is an expectation now of all of us as end users to have this hybrid living option for a variety of reasons, and I think that’s what’s here to stay,” he said. “Hybrid living is here to stay because the expectations of students and faculty have changed over time, not just because of the pandemic, but how we consume content in our lives. We want to consume it when we want, how we want it … whether you’re doing it via transcripts, via recordings, via live streaming or in person, giving those students and faculty choices is really what this is all about.”
