HyFlex Best Practices

As most of you know by now, there is a “shell” in Discovery for each of your courses that is automatically created by our data infrastructure, so you only need to open this and begin work.  

Only by mapping out our courses in our learning management system and obliging our students to navigate their way through the course over the semester via Discovery will we be positioned to flex in various ways given the different scenarios we might face over the term. 

What does it mean to build out your courses? 

• Rather than simply posting your syllabus on Discovery, take the detailed plans for each class session and embed those in Discovery, by week and class session. 
• Use Discovery as the primary mode of communication with your students. 
• Have most student assignments uploaded within Discovery and provide feedback on assignments via Discovery.
  • Note: Placing Assignments in Discovery gives students one calendar (in Discovery) that lists all assignments due across all their classes, and thus better enables them to track work across the term.

What has the Task Force determined as the MINIMUM requirements for having courses “built out” in Discovery?

By the first day of class, you should have on Discovery: 

• Broad outline of your course via Weekly or Module sections with readings, F2F or Asbury Live Session reminders  
• Assignment Section where all graded assignments will be uploaded 
• Faculty members know how to email their classes from within Discovery and know how to post announcements in Discovery 
• Faculty members know how to schedule a Zoom session from within Discovery. 

Our ITS unit will be spending the latter part of the summer outfitting most of our classrooms to enable us to have students join in remotely, and we are expecting to identify students in our classes who can help facilitate our Zoom interactions. You will also want to be able to operate Zoom from your home or office. 

This represents a different sort of teaching and learning infrastructure for our classes than we are used to and is a shift that must happen before the start of the term. (Otherwise we may be caught in the situation we were in during the latter part of Spring semester, where most of us were just doing a patch job to limp through the semester). 

Planning now will enable you to teach confidently and purposefully whatever conditions may transpire (including the previously mentioned possibility that students are sent home before end of term).