by James Rutherford, City St George’s, University of London, UK.
Teaching Here and There: Why this podcast still matters for the future of hybrid teaching and how it can improve practice today.
(This article is a follow-up to ‘Teaching Here and There’ by Dominic Pates, 2023.)
Hybrid teaching isn’t a mode you switch on, it’s a learning experience that is designed for students in the room, for students online, and often for students catching up later. In the post-pandemic reality of higher education, that challenge hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s matured. Universities are refining their digital environment, students expect more choice and flexibility, and academics are being asked to deliver quality teaching across multiple contexts, without doubling their workload. (Good luck with that) This combination makes hybrid teaching both strategically important and personally demanding for teaching staff.
That’s exactly why Teaching Here, and There exists, as a practical, honest, and research-aware podcast series exploring developing practices in hybrid teaching in higher education
Whether you’re planning hybrid delivery for the first time or you’ve been doing it for a while and want to improve quality, inclusion, and student engagement, this series is a valuable companion. It’s based on real experiences from academics, students, learning technologists, and higher education voices navigating hybrid teaching in practice.
What is Teaching Here and There?
Teaching Here and There is a podcast series for exploring evolving practices in hybrid teaching in higher education, hosted by Dominic Pates, Dr Ivan Sikora, and James Rutherford. The show launched in summer 2021 and runs across three series. It features conversations spanning pedagogy, learning spaces, institutional strategy, psychology, staff development, and, critically, the lived experiences of students.
You can find it wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Why hybrid teaching still needs dedicated, practical resources
A lot of what’s been written about hybrid teaching focuses on definitions or tools. But the day-to-day reality is more complicated. Hybrid teaching introduces time-management challenges, communication complexity, technology reliability, and assessment issues, both for staff and students.
The consensus from guests agreed that those challenges don’t simply disappear once the technology is installed; they need ongoing pedagogic adaptation, staff support, and particularly, thoughtful course design to avoid creating a “two-tier” experience, where one group of students consistently gets the best of the session.
Meanwhile, the HE sector is moving toward a more refined definition and planning around blended, hybrid, and flexible approaches, encouraging universities to be clear about time, place, pace, and support, rather than treating ‘hybrid’ as a one-size-fits-all solution. This is where Teaching Here and There becomes particularly valuable; it documents what actually happens, what works, what fails, what students notice, and what institutions need to do differently.
What makes Teaching Here and There especially useful?
- It treats hybrid teaching as a whole-system design problem
Hybrid teaching succeeds when pedagogy, technology, space, and support come together. That alignment shows up repeatedly in the series through discussions that include not just academic perspectives but also learning space development and learning technology voices. A prime example is the Edinburgh Futures Institute, see episode 18 to hear more about their particular approach to hybrid teaching and learning.
It matches what the literature has emphasised, hybrid teaching practice must be designed around inclusion, social connection, sensitivity to presence inequality, flexibility, and engagement, and not simply the latest technology.
- It takes student experience seriously (not as an afterthought)
The podcast has featured student perspectives explicitly, including episodes built around student reflections on hybrid teaching experiences across institutions. See episodes 12 and 13. This matters because hybrid teaching can fail if online students feel disengaged, and in-room students can become the “default audience” unless staff intentionally design participation and interaction.
- It doesn’t shy away from the cognitive load of “teaching in two places at once”
One of the recurring realities in hybrid delivery is the significant cognitive load on teaching staff, what with monitoring the chat, reading the room, managing audio delays, handling screensharing, and facilitating group work across both modalities. The podcast series provides a forum to discuss that challenge, which is the first step toward designing support structures that reduce it, rather than normalising academic overload.
Without reproducing any show content, it’s worth highlighting a few episodes that illustrate the range of topics and value of the podcast series.
Episode 14 features Dr Brian Beatty, who is known for the HyFlex course design and the principle-led approach to learner choice and inclusivity. Brian pioneered the development and evaluation of the HyFlex course design model for blended learning environments, implementing a “student-directed-hybrid” approach to better support student learning.
Episode 16 is a retrospective show, recorded in a hybrid space at City St. George’s, University of London. The hosts of the series reflect on learning gathered across conversations and the realities of working in hybrid spaces, an approach that underlines the show’s value as a study conducted directly alongside professionals in higher education.
For a crowd-sourced “voices from across the globe” special, see Episode 17. This extended show compiles responses from multiple international contributors who answered common questions about experiences, benefits, challenges, and who were able to look to the future of hybrid teaching.
If you’re already teaching in a hybrid mode and looking to refine your approach, you could use the Teaching Here and There podcast as a tool for reflective practice.
1. Audit participation equity: who contributes, who is acknowledged, and who receives feedback first? An effective hybrid design needs to address “presence inequality” deliberately.
2. Simplify and be consistent with your hybrid learning design: coherent formats help reduce cognitive load for both staff and students, especially when managing multiple channels at once.
3. Increase meaningful engagement: the aim isn’t to simply “broadcast” lectures, but to design hybrid sessions where time together is used for high-value interaction, group work and active learning.
4. Build in support and feedback loops: hybrid teaching works best when institutions provide professional development, reliable AV/IT support, and opportunities for regular evaluation that allow staff to adapt and improve over time.
The overriding refrain from the Teaching Here and There podcast is that hybrid teaching isn’t going away, so we need better, more open conversations about how it works in practice. Research gathered from the podcast highlights both the potential and the complexity of hybrid models. They can combine the strengths of face-to-face interaction with the flexibility of online learning, but they also bring ongoing challenges around technology, communication, engagement, assessment, and staff support.
At the same time, sector-wide curriculum design work is calling for new models, clearer language and more intentional approaches to time and place. The traditional timetable structure doesn’t automatically translate into effective hybrid delivery. That’s where ‘Teaching Here and There’ comes in. It can act as a living resource for staff development, reflective practice, and institutional learning. Because it’s grounded in conversation rather than compliance, it creates space for the uncertainty, experimentation, and iteration that hybrid teaching still requires.
A research paper on the whole podcast series will be produced later this year by JR.
