Hybrid Learning Demands Technology and Humanity

“My fear is that the pandemic killed online learning,” says Dr. Brooke Lester, enjoying the irony of such a statement and perfectly sincere in his concern.

The sweeping shifts the COVID-era brought to online learning opened doors and kindled fresh vision for the Garrett community. New technologies for online teaching developed rapidly, creating opportunities that led to significant changes in Garrett’s student body. International enrollment increased as students were able to take classes while still in their home country, and it quickly became clear that online classes could better serve domestic students already engaged in ministry across the United States. Garrett’s increasingly global student body, with students learning from a distance in both domestic and international contexts, were important considerations as the seminary made the decision to move to move to new buildings on Northwestern’s campus—to invest more deeply in the technology that will better facilitate residential and remote students learning together in Garrett’s classrooms.

Dr. Lester served as Garrett’s director of digital learning from 2011 until just last year. In the early days of online learning, a decade before the pandemic began, institutions were debating the value and risks of virtual learning, a conversation that pushed faculty to consider what it means to teach well. When the pandemic arrived, those careful conversations were replaced by an urgent need to move everything online. Over time, digital learning came to be the responsibility of the whole institution. Now Dr. Lester, like much of the faculty and staff, sees that transition as an opportunity to reinvigorate those careful conversations and intentionality around Garrett’s technology use.

“It’s another opportunity to look at our practices and ask why we do the things we do,” Dr. Lester says. “How do we thoughtfully reflect on our responsibility to our students, future students, and the faculty who will inherit our decisions?”

Currently, the conversations happening among faculty, staff and students ask what it means to student experience, build community, and form equitable partnerships. Assistant Director of Technology David Frisk, who serves as part of the transition team, emphasizes how important it is that decisions about technology be made in conversation with faculty and in support of student learning. He wonders how Garrett might provide more effective technological access and support for students in other countries and whether artificial intelligence may soon provide real-time language translation to facilitate deeper communication across language differences.

For Academic Dean Jennifer Harvey, the opportunities being created by online and hybrid learning offer a chance to meet the challenges of Garrett’s decolonial commitments and disrupt traditional power dynamics. She imagines that, for students in Evanston, meeting in classroom spaces more appropriate to the number of in-person attendees and more efficient for those joining online will give hybrid classes a more mutual and intimate feel. At the same time, the expanded role of online learning will, she hopes, lead to new kinds of relationships as Garrett finds ways to collaborate with pastors and ministries overseas to provide contextual education for international students and collaborate with faculty at partner institutions. Doing so will require the kind of humility and attention to particularity that Dean Harvey already sees developing as the community navigates virtual space together.

“I’m noticing how often now folks don’t say ‘Good morning’ when they start a meeting,” she says. “They say ‘Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening . . .’ Those are really small things, but they’re about belonging.”

That kind of awareness of embodied experience is, according to Dr. Rolf Nolasco, essential to navigating online and hybrid spaces well. Hybrid classrooms certainly make learning more accessible, he says, but can make it far more difficult to read the room, leading him to ask what presence means “when everyone is, quite literally, captured in a box?” Whatever the answer to that question is, it must include “cultivating attentiveness, care, and relational depth within technologically mediated spaces.” For Dr. Nolasco, one method he uses is to offer grounding practices at the beginning of each class, practices that he has used for years but hold new meaning amidst the realities of online learning.

“In hybrid environments, grounding takes on an additional function,” he says. “It’s not only a practice of cultivating presence, but also of recovering attention in the midst of fragmentation, negotiating varying degrees of visibility, and sustaining connection across different forms of participation. Presence here is no longer given; it must be intentionally constructed.”

Like Dr. Nolasco and Dean Harvey, PhD candidate Dri Rivera emphasizes attention to embodied realities “on the other side of the screen.” Rivera began their doctoral work in Christian Education at Garrett after teaching classes at a public school where students were required to spend the school day staring at a screen. They wanted the seminary classes they would teach to attend more fully to their students’ embodied realities and to be “more liberative, more equitable, and more justice oriented.” Over time, they familiarized themselves with a variety of learning tools, and found two were consistently well received: Mentimeter, which creates a word cloud based on student responses, and Padlet, which they describe as a virtual “bulletin board.” Both allowed creative response as well as an anonymity that might allow students to engage more freely.

Yet, Rivera insists, the particular technologies, “the tools aren’t really the main thing. It’s about how we treat each other.” Using technology well is a matter of sustained attention to the humanity of everyone involved, whether that means choosing fonts that work for people with dyslexia, ensuring enough breaks to avoid eye strain, or sending Grubhub gift cards to those who join lunch events virtually. When teaching hybrid classes, Rivera is intentional about turning first to online students to share, making clear that they are more than an afterthought. These kinds of small decisions aim not just to provide access to technology but to facilitate deeper engagement and a sense that every voice is valued.

That sense of community is possible, even across technology-mediated distance, as Rivera has experienced herself in a moment that convinced her of the value of online learning. It happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, in a class taught by two pastoral theologians who led communion over Zoom.

“I was amazed that I was by myself at my dining room table with all these little boxes in front of me and everyone’s holding up all the different elements — someone had a Cheez-it and someone had a potato chip and someone had bread — and it still felt like communion, that same unifying moment that we have in person. I breathed a sigh of relief. I thought, I can still do this. I can still be a part of the body of Christ, even if I’m at a distance.”