Speaker 1: All right, welcome everybody. Thank you guys for listening. This is going to be our demonstration on high flex programming as a delivery approach for changing student demographics and demands. We are from Southeast Missouri State University. Just to kind of introduce everybody. My name is Abby Risser I am the online instructional coordinator from Southeast online. Our presenters today we have Dr. Hildebrand clubs who is the assistant professor for program coordinating for the ma higher education program. We also have Dr. Sarah Dietrich, who is an associate professor for the English department and is also the graduate coordinator for the MIT soft program. We also have Dr. Chelsea McNeely who is the director for Southeast online and early college programs. I'll be kind of leading you guys through today and we'll be looking at some differences in programs in high flex programming at Southeast. So, if Chelsea'd like to take it away we'll kind of introduce what high flex programming looks like at Southeast. Yeah, thanks Abby.

Speaker 2: So, when we think back to COVID and as the situation was evolving. Some have now described that period of time in the teaching and learning space as panic God G. And a lot of you can probably relate to that idea that we were experiencing a lot of panic in that time when we were evolving and adapting what we were doing in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Coming out of that period of panic. There have been lots of great new innovations that have helped really impact the way that we look at teaching and learning. And one innovation that we've adopted at Southeast Missouri State as a result of that period of panic God G is high flex. So, here are the different outcomes that we're going to cover with you today. We are really going to be focusing on how our institution has evolved from delivering high flex courses to high flex programs. Some of the opportunities and some of the different challenges we've faced. We're going to talk about how delivering courses was different than actually moving programs to a fully high flex format. And really the impetus for us doing this was to make sure that our unique student population needs were met and that we could really provide these robust teaching and learning spaces. So, we're going to focus on the students at the heart of the conversation and how their needs and how the changing demographics of our students have really precipitated our desire to move into a more high flex teaching and learning space.

Speaker 1: So, Dr. Gloves, if we could start with you just to outline your program and what your student demographic looks like a little bit.

Speaker 3: Sure. So, this is the Master of Arts in Higher Education Administration. These are students who want to be student affairs professionals working in residence life, financial aid, advising, all of those different jobs on campus and we have a 36 hour program. It's aligned with the Council for the Advancement of Standards and Higher Education's guidelines for master's preparation programs in student affairs. And we have a pretty diverse student population. We have traditional students who discovered student affairs in undergrad, because you don't really know about it until you go to college. We have current university staff, people who are already working at the Southeast. I have student athletes many times who have another year of eligibility and they finished their undergraduate degree and so they're looking for a master's program that they had never possibly considered before. And then I also have a large population of international students who are continuing their studies in the US by choosing this master's program.

Speaker 4: So TESOL, just for those of you who are not quite sure what that means, is Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. And so our program prepares people who have been or are and are going to be English teachers in the United States and all over the world. And we have a mix of students. Some of them are full-time students. Many of them are part-time students because they're working full-time in addition to pursuing their degree. We have students from the United States and also students from other countries. And we have students who are in Cape Girardeau, which is where Southeast Missouri State is, and we have students who are all over the United States and all over the world. So we both have a handful of US students, a number of international students in Missouri, and then a handful of international students and US students outside of the United States and then students all over the United States.

Speaker 1: Okay, for the next question, looking a little bit at why you chose HyFlex for a program.

Speaker 3: So I'm excited to answer this question because I had taught one of my courses, I previously worked in communication studies in modern languages and taught health communication and intercultural communication along with public speaking. And I wanted to see how it would go to have my health communication class and my intercultural communication class be HyFlex. I had taught both of them completely face-to-face and I had taught them blended and I had also taught them completely online. And so I thought it was a great opportunity to try out HyFlex. What I learned from that experience, because during COVID with my public speaking students who were mostly freshmen, we did something where we had half of them in class and half of them on Zoom. And towards the end of the semester, I had almost all of my students on Zoom, they weren't making the best choices for themselves. Meanwhile, my more advanced students in health comm and intercultural comm were really making good use of the HyFlex modality. That prefrontal cortex was a little bit more developed. They were using it in wise ways. And so when I applied for the position in my current role, they had originally wanted this program to go 100% online. And I looked at their demographics and I thought, well, that would rule out all of the international students that we have here because their visa requires them to have some face-to-face classes. A lot of the people who are working at Southeast and are non-traditional students are not as technologically savvy as some of our more traditional students and would prefer the sort of old fashioned face-to-face interaction. So I proposed taking classes, HyFlex, and then ultimately making the whole program HyFlex instead of 100% online so that I could keep all of the students we currently have and hopefully attract more as well.

Speaker 4: So when I started Southeast, which was about five years ago, we essentially had two different TESOL, Masters in TESOL programs. All of the content was the same, but all of the courses were offered both online and in a face-to-face mode. And with, as Chelsea said, with COVID, we moved to HyFlex. I actually taught an entire year from Massachusetts where all of my, what would have been face-to-face classes were HyFlex. So like Brooke, got a lot of experience with that kind of platform. And so frankly, we've never gone back. All of the courses that would have been face-to-face in the past are now HyFlex courses. Abby was mentioning that we're not 100% HyFlex at this point. There still are some classes that are 100% online, but essentially each course, or for most of our courses, students who want to have the opportunity to come to campus or to take part in synchronous online opportunities can. And then we have students who are 100% asynchronous in all of the courses across the program.

Speaker 3: One of the things that I really tried to do when I started this was to make sure I talked with all of my different stakeholders and got all of their feelings and thoughts about this and incorporated that. And everybody was really supportive in theory. And much like Dr. Dietrich says, when it's time to apply what you know, some students or faculty then suddenly there was a little bit of resistance when it actually came time to implement. I don't know exactly what they thought was going to happen, or maybe they didn't think it was really going to happen, but we're bringing those folks along. And that same thing has happened with having to do things in new ways when at the university there are old policies and procedures in place. For example, a lot of the classes in our program have been taught in a blended format. So I made things HyFlex and blended, which didn't send off any alarm bells anywhere for several semesters. And then this past semester, our registrar was like, no, you can't do that. Because if it's blended, that means somebody has to be online some of the time and you can't ask them to do that. And ultimately, our vice provost intervened and was like, well, everybody gets to decide how to utilize their class time and they've been doing this and there hasn't been any problem. And it's not an issue with accreditation and all of those types of things. But it was pretty tense there for a second because we thought me and all of our adjuncts were going to have to add another hour and a half of instruction face to face during the week. And so you have to have some real advocacy for your program and have your allies, have your tribe that can help make these things happen.

Speaker 4: I think that Brooke really brought up so many important points about the decisions that are sort of have to be in place in and around the courses. I would say that my own experience has been, and maybe this is on me, that I have not reached out as much as I could have to other stakeholders. And so it's been, I found that putting together a high quality course in any modality is challenging and to make a high quality, high flex course is particularly challenging. It takes extra work. Ultimately, I think it's absolutely worth it. But I think we need to be honest about that. I would say for me, some of the challenges have been that my courses are almost, we have a few photos to show you and you'll see what I'm talking about, that my classes are almost entirely discussion based and there's a lot of small group work. That works really well when we can zoom around the class on our little chairs with wheels, but it gets a little bit more complicated when we have some of the people on Zoom. And I've gotten very used to, and my students have gotten very used to sort of shouting at the ceiling, which is where the microphones are. And also, we've thought a lot about where the cameras are and I have to say thank you to Chelsea who came to my classroom and helped me think through what made it possible to add cameras. So for me, I think something that I think a lot about is how can the teaching drive the technology, as opposed to having the technology drive the teaching. And I think for that to happen, different stakeholders do need to be in the classroom together and talk about, well, what does teaching look like, at least in this particular context.

Speaker 1: And then if we can kind of quickly walk through some of our HyFlex successes that we've had as well.

Speaker 3: So, again, the students who benefit from HyFlex really benefit. I've had some non-traditional students who told me this was the only way that they could have pursued a master's degree. They chose to enter the program when they found out that it was HyFlex. And so sometimes they're in class, sometimes they're on Zoom, sometimes they're asynchronous because it depends on whether or not they got a babysitter. I've got some staff who travel for recruitment that work in admissions. And so that flexibility and modality helps with my student athletes when they're traveling for games. And then I have had several students who took jobs away from Cape Girardeau in the midst of the program and they were still able to finish their master's degree because of the HyFlex. Even though they had previously been face-to-face all the time, they became a Zoom or asynchronous student. And then I have a couple of students who have some pretty serious health issues. And so this gives them the flexibility they need to not fall behind when they have a hospitalization.

Speaker 4: And for me, I think the challenge that I mentioned on the last slide is actually the strength of the HyFlex program. It allows us to bring people together who otherwise would not have the chance to work together. As I've mentioned, often the students who are in the in-person synchronous session will be from a huge number of countries, which is really exciting, but not usually students who are born in the United States. So we've had students who have Zoomed in for every class from Wisconsin and the other parts of the United States, other parts of the world. So it gives people a chance to interact with people that they otherwise wouldn't have a chance to meet. And to be very, very frank, I mean, I think we need to talk about the nuts and bolts of things. Courses need to have enough people in them to be offered. And so HyFlex gives us the option of having 7 to 10 to 12 people in an in-person class and for the class to run. Because even if there might only be a smaller number in the classroom at one time, there might be 20 or 25 students in the class total. And so that allows us to offer opportunities for the in-person students, which might not exist, actually, without this option.

Speaker 2: Yes, thank you guys so much for that just quick look at how you have innovated your programs into HyFlex programs. As we've come out of Panic Goji, we really have found strategic ways to meet the needs of our students. And HyFlex has been certainly one of those ways. I hope the viewers are inspired by your tenacity and your creativity and your willingness to continue to find ways to put square pegs in round holes. It's been a challenge for sure, but you guys have seized those and you've created loads of opportunities. As Dr. Dietrich said, we really let the teaching drive our technology decisions and we really let our students drive our teaching decisions. So thank you all very much for letting us share today about our two HyFlex programs at Southeast.