Exploring Students' Perceptions and Engagement in Hybrid Flexible Courses

The Hybrid Flexible (HyFlex) instruction format provides learners with the flexibility to choose from in-person, online synchronous, or asynchronous learning. However, students' learning experiences with HyFlex has not been studied at scale. The primary goal of this study was to investigate how students' perceptions about the availability of learning resources relates to their course engagement and performance in a HyFlex learning environment. In Spring 2022, we administered an end-of-semester survey to one graduate and five undergraduate courses, each of which utilized the HyFlex instructional model. Courses were selected from three different colleges at a large public university in the United States. We investigated students' perceptions about the effectiveness, importance, and ease of use of all three learning modalities that were offered (in-person, online synchronous, and asynchronous) and the learning support options (instructor access outside of class, learning help resources, and flexibility to choose learning modality without restriction). With a sample size of 537, we found that 30% of surveyed students found in-person and online synchronous learning important for their learning whereas 60% found asynchronous learning and the flexibility to choose their learning modality important for their learning. When asked about their actual use of different modalities, students reported using asynchronous learning the most, followed by online synchronous learning. In-person learning was reportedly the least utilized. We found that non-real-time learning modalities contributed positively to overall student engagement. Students preferred to use asynchronous resources and have the flexibility to choose among learning modalities. Yet, results indicate that students who incorporated some real-time learning not only had higher performance-related engagement (e.g., confidence in their ability to succeed in the course) than those who relied primarily on non-real-time learning, but they also earned higher grades for the course. This suggests that utilizing some in-person or online synchronous modalities in conjunction with the student-preferred asynchronous options leads to improved course outcomes for both student engagement and course performance.