Improved HyFlex Course Design Utilizing Live Online and On-demand Courses

HyFlex (Hybrid-Flexible) courses can provide flexibility to respond to student needs to provide both online and face-to-face courses at the same time. However, the support staff is necessary to run a HyFlex class to provide live streaming of a face-to-face lecture since the teacher has to focus on giving a lecture and responding to student questions. In this paper, we propose a new implementation of the HyFlex course so that the teacher can implement a HyFlex class without the support staff. The improved HyFlex course utilizes live online courses and on-demand courses. The teacher first records and edits the on-demand video before the class. Students watch the video in the class regardless of whether they are at home or school. The teacher launches the online conference system, such as Zoom or Webex, at the class to respond to questions and comments from the students. The students can make questions and comments using chat or audio provided by the online conference systems. They can quickly have a response from the teacher since the teacher focuses on answering the questions and comments during the class. We run the improved HyFlex course in two different types of classes at our university. Approximately 85% of the students are satisfied with the improved HyFlex course.