The challenges and opportunities of hybrid education with location asynchrony: Implications for education policy

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted traditional on-site education. One currently deployed alternative is hybrid education formats, which combine online and on-site elements. Educators, educational institutions, and policymakers need to understand the challenges and opportunities hybrid education can pose to both students and educators to orchestrate these formats successfully. This is especially true when hybrid education allows asynchrony of the learning location, for example, allowing students to choose whether to attend online or on-site. To understand these challenges and opportunities, we deployed a qualitative research design and identified three challenges and three opportunities of hybrid education, allowing location asynchrony, based on two data sources, interviews with educators and open-ended survey answers from students. First, we describe these findings and highlight three larger underlying themes (balancing flexibility with complexity, the challenge of interpersonal connectedness in highly diverse settings, and digital proficiency), including sometimes opposing perspectives of students and educators. As a second step, we matched existing policy guidelines from the European Union with the status quo from our data, and as a result, we identified and discussed four policy implications.