UC San Diego

Professors in higher education are responsible for teaching diverse student populations complex material. Further, many instructors have yet to have specific pedagogical training on how to build and deliver equity-minded courses using a technology-enhanced curriculum. Consequently, the COVID-19 global pandemic has caused disruptions to educational systems worldwide, and instructors whose courses were built intentionally using established evidence-based design principles could pivot from face-to-face to remote instruction with less disruption to student learning. As universities return to more in-person classes, instructors offer flexibility for students to attend classes via multiple modalities, such as in-person via video conferencing software or fully asynchronous learning management systems. This hybrid-flexible (hyflex; Beatty, 2019) approach to teaching offers great opportunities for students to continue learning during and beyond the pandemic; however, it is a complex operation for the professor and instructional teams supporting the class. Moreover, teaching equitably in this modality increases the complexities. This study introduces hyflex learning as a modality instructors use to offer equitable education to their students, followed by a review of the literature and methods used in this study. Next, Adams et al.’s social justice education faculty development and Beatty’s four pillars of hyflex course design frameworks are leveraged to provide a theoretical framework for this study’s design, delivery, and measurement of equity-centered hyflex courses (Adams et al., 2016, 2022; Beatty, 2019). Finally, the study aimed to qualitatively explore students’ experiences taking a hyflex course with equity-centered design. The potential impact of this study sheds light on what aspects of the hyflex environment helped or hindered students in meeting their learning outcomes, potentially offering key findings for practitioners to design and deliver equitable hyflex courses.