How does a hybrid approach facilitate a flexible access to teaching and learning: Training the Trainers for Interpreting Studies 2023

Time flies. Sometimes it goes so fast that there is no space to stop and reflect, and celebrate too!

Well today, I want to stop and share our collective experience of the #trainingoftrainers for #Interpretingstudies at London Metropolitan University, a short course that took place during the last week of June 2023 (20 hours over 5 days).


So what's new? It was the first time I ran the course in a hybrid mode 😊.

- Four of us were onsite Silvia Scivales ACIL (UK based), Ebaa Alwash (UK based) and Asuman Yıldırım (Based in Turkey). I was on site too.

- Seven colleagues were online @RoksolanaPovoroznyuk and Oleksandra Litvinyak (Based in Ukraine), Irina Sanders (UK based), María Luz Salas Roca (Based in Peru), Lucienne Peace (UK/Malta based), Emma Jane Brown (based in Spain) and Ondrej Klabal (based in the Czech Republic).

The first question I have asked myself is: is the hybrid experience better for participants compared to the online experience?

It certainly offers an inclusive way to participate. Online participants may not have been able to leave their country, work, families and spend money to fly, pay for accommodation etc... Actually, an onsite participant was unwell during the week; had participation been onsite only, she would not have been able to continue the course. But with the hybrid approach, her teaching and learning experience was delivered in a way that suited her unplanned context.

However, is the hybrid approach more enjoyable for the online participants who knew they could not attend onsite? This is a question to explore further. Initial informal questions suggested it was more dynamic.

The clear structure of our time facilitated anticipation and contributions, creating examples of #flippedclassroom opportunities.

- Day 1: My students and I. Creating a safe space to shape a community of practice/community of learners
- Day 2: Lesson planning
- Day 3: Creating teaching materials
- Day 4: Assessment: providing formative feedback
- Day 5: Assessment: providing summative feedback 

It simply was fantastic to embrace the international diversity of our teaching experience in conference interpreting and public service interpreting. But communication had to be 'organised'. We used a number of tools that are ideal for hybrid teaching:

- Padlet: a fantastic platform where we hosted our teaching materials. Ideal for dynamic collective lesson planning. It is visual and offers so many opportunities to communicate with audio/video input, colour themes for posts and embedded links to collective documents that can be used live by all participants. It is great for a short course that cannot always be hosted on the university VLE fast enough.

- A shared #Googledrive with a dedicated individual Portfolio of Practice for reflection, accessible to all to stimulate a collective conversation.

- We used MeWe as a private home to build a space that we called 'home' for our week together. The platform was open about a week before the course started to exchange and get to know one another. It remains open once the course is over.

Exploring the space before and after the official time for the course is a way to build trust and shape the community that can continue to comment, share and support one another for as long as they wish. It is a space that is extremely valuable for a hybrid approach to encourage the social informal conversations onsite participants naturally have with one another.

- We used Zoom to host our hybrid session as it is the most relevant platform for teaching interpreting classes. Recordings are another way to enhance the flexibility element of a hybrid course, especially when attendance took place over different time zones. Revisiting what we did in our own time was a way to encourage reflection and catch up with what was not fully explored, especially during an intensive course when there is so much to take in in such a short time.

- Mentimeter and Slido, as well as Polls on Zoom were ideal to take the pulse on key aspects of teaching and learning. A great way to open conversation in a short time. The diversity of tools and platforms was a way to diversify 'the routine' that can easily lower the motivation to engage.

- Finally the Zoom Whiteboards (latest versions) now offer a very intuitive and fun way to contribute in a hybrid set up. It can be saved and shared too.

But what was perhaps the most challenging and fun, was to transform onsite specific activities into a hybrid set up. It was extremely low tec at times and we had to think on our feet. But the more tec I use, the more sensorial tools I like to introduce, such as stickers to create hybrid groups, balloons to capture key ideas, icecream sticks to allocate roles. We then created videos using our mobile phones to create a short story with online and onsite participation, using our balloons to represent the key elements of our lesson planning.

Trying to move away from the online persona to shape a hybrid space requires quite a lot of thinking, and a lot of work as it is quite new. But it is fascinating. It is an opportunity to question and reflect on how we learn together as co-creators.

Hybrid teaching may feel new at present but it will become the norm. It is not just a matter of connecting online or attending onsite. It is about active participation and creation that truly offers a flexible access to teaching and learning.

As a disabled person, I had to miss about 70% of my education. I was at home or in hospital quite frequently and felt excluded from the community. Being the odd one out for what appears to be 'the wrong reasons' has motivated me to finally find a way to offer a flexible access to teaching and learning to all. It inspired me to create the interpreting suite with innovative technology at London Met in 2018. But the way we teach hybrid at present is just the beginning but with the development of technology, it can only move forward.