Issues that hybrid, online, and blended modes of teaching and learning introduce to collective agreements and bargaining

A few weeks ago, I was invited to offer input to a committee at a Canadian university examining issues that hybrid, online, and blended modes of teaching and learning introduce to collective agreements and bargaining. I appreciated that the committee identified experts to speak with in order to gain an evidence-informed understanding of the issues they were facing rather than allow their deliberations be guided by assumptions and beliefs (which, to be honest, many of the conversations around modality default to!).

I thought the questions I was asked were relevant to many, and so I am sharing them below. The gist of my responses follows each question.

• What is your sense of the future of online, hybrid, and blended course delivery in Canadian universities?
  • Necessary, valuable, and growing. Ignore them at your own peril.
• How do you see the work, the workload, the rights, and the responsibilities of faculty changing within this shifting terrain?
  • Rising workloads at first, but shifting over time (similar to how workload is higher when assigned a new course; opportunity to learn & explore relationship between online/hybrid and pedagogy, which may transfer to other settings). Responsibilities around quality similar, if not higher (which is unfortunate given that conversations around quality are different in relation to in-person courses). Rights: an opportunity for expanding the conversation to encompass in-person practices: reflect on ownership and where the real value of faculty lies – it’s not content.
• What would you suggest are the biggest advantages to these delivery modes, and what would you flag as the biggest challenges that institutions face in moving towards these modes?
  • advantages: rethinking pedagogy, flexibility, supporting justice and EDI, reaching and supporting different kinds of learners; challenges: institutional infrastructure to support online/hybrid learning quality at the same level as supporting in-person.
• What kinds of supports—technological, training, in-class, infrastructural, workload-based, or other – do you see as necessary for faculty to successfully deliver course through online modes?
  • This is the right question to ask. It’s not just about individual skills, competencies, and perceptions – it’s about how the institutions will support these learning modalities at the system level. In addition to the ones mentioned in the question, my answer highlighted that online/hybrid learning is a team sport and noted the need for instructional design support.  
• As part of our own deliberations, we are concerned with the process through which mode of delivery for particular courses is determined. Do you have any advice on how this best happens? Are there any lessons from experiences at other universities about this?
  • This is a difficult one, especially at a time of many circulating viruses. I emphasized the need for flexibility and a decision-making process that is based on mutual trust and cooperation, and that is informed by student input. Ideally one where decisions aren’t top-down and aren’t solely guided by individual preferences. Also: the proportion of courses that are online need not be uniform across departments.