Person-to-person interactions in hybrid teaching and learning

This paper aims to investigate person-to-person interactions in a hybrid classroom setting from a Community of Inquiry perspective. A typology of person-to-person interaction in hybrid learning environment is proposed. Hybrid mode seems to be the most convenient setting in terms of flexibility. In the hybrid classroom setting, teachers multi-task to take care of both onsite and online students at the same time. Students need to simultaneously communicate with the teacher in the lecture theatre and with their peers both in the classroom and online. In-depth interviews with university students and teachers were conducted in Hong Kong to investigate the challenges and the coping strategies of student-to-teacher interaction and student-to-student interaction in hybrid mode. Three distinct themes are generated: proximity; location and flexibility. The themes proximity and location contribute to the challenges. In short, challenges to student-to-teacher interactions include (1) the difficulty in accommodating the needs of online and in-class students at the same time, and (2) some online students are being ignored by the teachers. Challenges to student-to-student interactions include communication among online and onsite students; the Social Presence is found to be affected negatively by the hybrid approach. To alleviate such situations, solutions to challenges in student-to-student interactions are (1) more teamwork among students from online and in-class; and (2) encouraging learning from peers. We contribute to the literature on how to conduct hybrid teaching with greater efficiency by a new perspective to improve person-to-person interaction. The success factors of the hybrid mode are well-planned lessons, established familiarity, knowledge check, and adequate teaching equipment available.