Blurring the Boundaries of Teaching Modes to Improve the Experience of Professional Learners

Professionals have benefited from Penn State world campus courses and degree programs to advance their careers. Traditionally, students in professional master’s degrees mainly used asynchronous online and web-based instructions as their primary mode of learning. The last few years of fighting with COVID in university instructions has disrupted the dichotomy of resident vs. online learning and catalyzed multiple teaching modes (resident, remote synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid). It is important to understand how these teaching modes impact the learning of resident students. In this paper, I argue that the creative use of hybrid modes has opened up new possibilities for professional students, but this practice must be carefully designed based on a deep understanding of the learning experience of professional students. I will support this argument with my own experiments on how these teaching modes could be seamlessly combined and some reflections on how delivery modes encourage or impede effective learning of professional students.