Collaborative activities in hybrid learning environments: Exploring teacher orchestration load and students’ perceptions

The recent Covid-19 pandemic made universities rethink their traditional educational models, shifting, in some cases, to pure online or hybrid models. Hybrid settings usually involve onsite (i.e., in the classroom) and online (e.g., in a different classroom, at home) students simultaneously under the instruction of the same teacher. However, while these models provide more flexibility to students, hybridity poses additional challenges for the specific case of collaborative learning, likely increasing the teachers' orchestration load and potentially hampering fruitful interactions among learners. In order to gather empirical evidence on the impact of hybridity in collaborative learning, this paper reports a study conducted in a hybrid classroom where a Jigsaw collaborative pattern was implemented with the Engageli software. The study involved 2 teachers and 67 students enrolled in a computer science undergraduate course. Teachers' post-interviews, questionnaires and an epistemic network analysis (ENA) were used to produce study findings. Results show that teachers reported a medium-to-high orchestration load for implementing and setting up the collaborative activities in the hybrid classroom. Among the factors that contributed most to such load, teachers highlighted the creation and live management of groups and collaborative documents. Additionally, the ENA showed that teachers put much effort on monitoring group interactions and solving technical issues. Finally, we observed relevant differences on students' perceptions (e.g., satisfaction with the attention received by the teachers) based on the cohort sizes and on the students’ attendance modality (onsite vs. online).