Towards a pattern language for hybrid education

Abstract

In this paper we offer an initial framework for a pattern language of hybrid education. With the term hybrid education, we imply the use of educational design patterns that actively strive to cut across, circumventing or upheave traditional dichotomies within education such as physical-digital, academic-nonacademic, online-offline, formal-informal, learning-teaching and individual-collective. In doing so, hybrid education invites uncertainty, open-endedness, risk-taking, experimentation, critical creativity, disruption, dialogue and democracy (back) into the heart of education. Accordingly we see, within hybrid education, the promise to push against and circumvent current trends of marketization, managerialism and standardization in higher education today. Here, a pattern language for hybrid education presents an alternative way of designing for future higher education in ways that are not focused on teaching to the test, playing it safe, rankings or gaming the system approaches. Rather, hybrid education focuses on open-endedness, risk-taking, relational entanglements, experimentation, exploration and empathy. In this way, designing for hybrid education is in this paper achieved, partly by taking a decidedly value-based and vision-driven approach to learning design patterns based on philosophy in higher education and critical pedagogy, partly by working together in hybrid ways and across disciplines and domains in order to open up both the field of teaching and learning in higher education as well as the field of learning design and design patterns. The result is the almost 80 design patterns for hybrid education. The paper presents the pattern categories for hybrid education, the different design patterns contained in these. Furthermore, the pattern mining ground and workshop process, the outcome of the value workshop and the vision workshop as well as three example scenarios is described in order to show both the underlying value and vision foundation for the pattern language as well as how it plays out in concrete scenarios.