The Joys and Sorrows of Synchronous Hybrid Teaching

This chapter presents and triangulates data from conversation and multimodal analysis with insights from teachers’ and students’ questionnaires to shed light on challenges and opportunities of synchronous hybrid teaching. Sequences of talk-in interaction are used to show how turns are allocated and how face-to-face and online students participate. The analysis is supported by data from student and teacher feedback, as well as the observer’s field notes. This modality is appealing for students as it allows for better time management and can make higher education more inclusive, affordable and sustainable. However, teachers’ answers reveal the difficulties and the strategies they experienced to establish quality learner-teacher, learner-learner and learner-content interaction. Despite being critical, teachers acknowledge the potential of this setting and share best practices to involve both students in person and from home and successfully manage interaction.