Toward a HyFlex Model
NYSID Prioritizes Choice and Flexibility
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced NYSID to temporarily close its campus last March and move classes online, the College was developing a hybrid flexible model with online, in-person, and experiential components. The pandemic accelerated this process, forcing NYSID to undergo years of digital transformation in mere months.
Hybrid flexible learning (HyFlex) refers to an educational model that combines traditional classroom experiences, experiential learning, and digital course delivery to give maximum choice to students and instructors. A true HyFlex model is neither fully online nor face to face: It uses technology to create a learning environment designed to support students wherever they may be. In a HyFlex course, for example, a parent whose child spikes a fever can decide to stay home and join his on-site studio digitally so he won’t miss a beat; or an instructor might choose to teach furniture detailing in person on Tuesday, give an online Zoom lecture on Thursday, and take her class to a furniture showroom on Friday.
BFA thesis studio in the East 70th Street building.
MFA1 studio at the Graduate Center.
BFA studio critique in the East 70th Street building.
For years, NYSID has been able to offer more choice and increased access through distance learning. The Basic Interior Design Certificate (BID), Associate in Applied Science in Interior Design (AAS), and Masters of Professional Studies in Sustainable Interior Environments (MPSS) have been offered remotely for years. The Masters of Professional Studies in Lighting Design (MPSL) is now offered fully online. The College has received permission from the New York State Education Department and the Office of the Professions to develop an online Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interior Design. This program will open for applications soon.
When the pandemic closed NYSID’s facilities last spring, the leadership of the College knew that it had to prepare for every eventuality in the fall. “We knew, even in the spring, that our strategic goals would be flexibility and choice,” says Ellen Fisher, PhD, vice president for academic affairs and dean, who has an MA from Columbia’s Teachers College in Computing in Education, and additional graduate degrees earned through online learning. “We had to bring a reduced number of students back to campus safely, in socially distant classrooms. We needed to allow for people who might be physically compromised or vulnerable, or living with a family member in that situation, to be able to choose an entirely virtual schedule. We needed to work with the technology department to redesign and prepare every in-person classroom so that a student quarantining from home could join their class in real time using videoconferencing technology. We used what we learned from the spring course evaluations and teacher feedback to refine our faculty training and become better versed in using technology as a tool for teaching. In short, NYSID’s administrators, faculty, and technology staff worked harder than ever before to offer the most choice, flexibility, and safety to students, accomplishing in a few months what might have taken years, were there not a crisis.”
There are now three kinds of courses being offered to students:
DL courses are asynchronous online courses that allow students to do their work on their own schedule.
DR courses are “real-time” or synchronous online courses taught in Zoom with live interaction between the students and faculty.
On-site courses can happen both online and in person at the same time. Students can join from home via Zoom while their peers are on-site in a traditional classroom.
All of these courses are organized and run through Canvas, the College’s learning management system (LMS).
NYSID is now much closer to becoming a HyFlex institution. Says Fisher, “This concept of maximum flexibility is the future of higher education. Choice is good for people. This is especially true of a school like ours with a nontraditional demographic of individuals who have jobs, children, and other responsibilities. HyFlex learning gives working adults the freedom to fit higher education into their lives, on their terms. I know this firsthand, because I could never have completed my doctorate without the option of distance education.”
“This concept of maximum flexibility is the future of higher education. Choice is good for people. This is especially true of a school like ours with a nontraditional demographic of individuals who have jobs, children, and other responsibilities. ”
Undergraduate Programs
For fall 2020, undergraduate students had the choice of a virtual schedule, with online studios and lecture courses, or a partially on-site program, with in-person studio courses at the 70th Street facility and lectures online.
Zoom gallery view of BFA thesis studio in the 70th Street Building.
The in-person studios had to be HyFlex, so that if the need arose for students to quarantine and participate from a distance, they could. Richard Todd Class, NYSID’s assistant dean, oversaw important physical and technological changes to the classrooms. The technology department upgraded the school’s internet bandwidth to handle the increased usage that comes with using Zoom. New projectors and screens were installed in classrooms. At 70th Street, student and faculty desks now have webcams/mics to facilitate HyFlex classes. In the rooms used for studios, there are overhead cameras so that students can not only view the instructors’ faces on screen, but also view the instructors’ hands as they draw or demonstrate on the desktop. Though NYSID does not have pure HyFlex classrooms, which ideally resemble a Hollywood production studio, the College has made tremendous technological strides in every classroom.
In person classrooms were “twinned” at 70th Street, with fewer workstations in each room so that desks may be spread out and students may remain six feet apart. This means the instructor can move between two classrooms, broadcasting via Zoom on a screen in each.
There’s evidence that this trial by fire is working for NYSID and its learning community. At the end of the spring semester, which was entirely online, 95.6% of students responded to course evaluations. Anecdotal and statistical evidence pointed to high student satisfaction with the digital format of classes. “Once, we thought there was no way you could replicate the studio experience virtually, but last spring, we found the exact opposite to be true,” says Barbara Weinreich, director of undergraduate programs, who teaches a variety of residential, commercial, and thesis studios at NYSID. “In Zoom, you see your students’ faces in an array, closeup, and I believe students are more engaged and the class feels more intimate because we can all see the expressions on each others’ faces. We thought the drawing and the drafting would be the most problematic part of teaching online, but in many ways, it has worked. Teachers can use the whiteboard in Zoom to draw in real time, and this has been a fabulous communication tool. You can also take over the students’ screens and annotate their work in real time.”
Graduate Programs
The Masters of Professional Studies in Sustainable Interior Environments (MPSS) was close to a HyFlex model even before the pandemic. Starting in 2019, students in the distance MPSS program joined their NYC-based peers virtually, and collaborated in a hybrid classroom. Students in the MPSS and MPSL (Masters of Professional Studies in Lighting) were given the choice of creating their own schedule and attending the in-person studio classroom, or joining from a distance. As it turns out, all MPSL students chose the 100% online option and studied from a distance this fall. The MPSS cohort is an integrated group of distance and in-person students as usual.
Students in both MFA programs, the professional-level Master of Fine Arts (MFA1) and the post-professional Master of Fine Arts (MFA2), were given the option of going 100% online or 100% on-site this fall. MFA2 students were also given the option to start in January.
MFA1 studio views at the Graduate Center. Photos: Cal Nugent.
At the Graduate Center, desks are large and already appropriately spaced for the COVID era, and class sizes are very small, usually with no more than 14 students. The podiums at the Graduate Center have been upgraded to tables with webcams, so that in-person classes can become HyFlex for individuals if necessary. In the MFA programs in particular, the students’ peers within a “studio cohort” are an extremely important part of the graduate experience because this replicates the collaborative studio environments that exist in design and architecture firms. This model is an integral part of the MFA1 experience; therefore, all MFA1 students, whether studying on-site or online, are in dedicated studios, with all their classmates attending via the same delivery system.
Barbara Lowenthal, associate dean, says,“There is definitely value in being in the room with your teacher and peers, but some studio learning has been even better online. For example, the faculty who taught the two-week design basics summer workshop for our incoming MFA students who have no art background raved about the quality and creativity of the work. The online students had fewer distractions working from home and were more resourceful in their use of materials, using tea bags, dried flowers, and even cardboard boxes in their projects.”
Constantly Improving Online Instruction
Freya Van Saun, coordinator of online and blended learning, was the person responsible for getting faculty members trained to bring their on-site courses into a “DR” online format when the College closed its physical spaces last March. She’s worked 12-hour days for months, yet she’s more focused on the efforts of others. “The faculty was extraordinary,” she says. “They enthusiastically put in tremendous time and effort to make it all happen.” The spring course evaluations were reassuringly positive and included anecdotes from instructors and students that shed light on how to improve the overall online experience of studios. Working closely with Ellen Fisher, Van Saun integrated all of this feedback into a series of summer training sessions, in which over 70 NYSID faculty members took part. These sessions were collaborative so the faculty could share what they had learned with each other.
Says Van Saun, “The perception that online education should cost less than in-person education bothers me. It takes time, training, technology, software, and specialized personnel, in addition to dedicated faculty, to create a good online learning experience. We can’t replicate physical presence, but we can support faculty and students in using digital tools to create community in other ways. People come out of DL and DR courses that are done right with deep learning and real contacts and friendships. Online learning can’t be a discounted product because it costs colleges more, and it’s the future.”
Preparedness With Perks
NYSID is ready to support any student who needs to isolate— and the whole community—if another lockdown happens and the College has to go fully online again. Says Van Saun, “The faculty is well-prepared to deliver online courses no matter what happens.” This is the value of HyFlex course design and NYSID’s approach.
In addition to all of this preparedness and flexibility, there is an exciting perk that comes with having a distance component in every classroom. Our instructors have global networks and relationships in the industry beyond New York. Now, they can invite design colleagues from anywhere in the world to be jurors for presentations and guest speakers. Over the summer, NYSID was able to bring in an incredible list of professional designers to virtually mentor students for the Nantucket by Design event as they worked on rooms in “The Oldest House” on the island. The list of mentors included Jamie Drake, Alexa Hampton, Young Huh, David Kleinberg, and Beth Diana Smith.
Says Ellen Fisher, “It’s easier for sought-after designers to give an hour of time via Zoom than to travel for an engagement. I’m excited about the potential this creates for NYSID in so many areas.”
Lessons Learned from Online Teaching
Freya Van Saun, coordinator of online and blended learning, shares tips and tools that are making NYSID faculty stronger online teachers.
Allow Critiques to Be Overheard
NYSID instructors found that students get a lot out from overhearing discussions about their peers’ work. Van Saun advised her trainees to encourage students in studios to use the mute button in Zoom to keep working while listening to critiques of other students’ work.
Breakout Rooms for Privacy or Peer Review
Van Saun found the best application of Zoom breakout rooms in studio classes was using them for private time to talk with a student about a hurdle in a project. Instructors also used them successfully for peer desk critiques, or peer focus groups for working out a specific task, like designing a stairwell.
Zoom Annotate and Whiteboard
Zoom’s Annotate feature allows a teacher to draw on a shared screen, and the Whiteboard lets an instructor write on a blank screen everyone can see. These were both powerful tools for NYSID instructors, who were able to draw in real time and take over screens to annotate computer renderings and drawings
Screencast-O-Matic for Grading and Feedback
This is a tool that allows faculty to create recordings of their voice and computer screen while they are giving feedback on a student’s projects. This can drastically speed up grading and provide students with feedback that they can access multiple times.
Build in Structure
Working with faculty member Francisco de León, Academic Affairs created Canvas templates that helped build structure into courses. Says Van Saun, “We created templates that would help everybody start from the same place in terms of designing a course, including a front page with basic course information, where and how it’s meeting, a picture of the instructor, and a link to class content.”
