Hybrid flexible (HyFlex) seminar delivery – A technical overview of the implementation

This paper investigates a new technology for Hybrid flexible delivery (known as HyFlex), as implemented at King's College London. The relatively novel character of HyFlex, of mixing synchronously on-line and in-room teaching, and the recent changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic mean this use of the technology and teaching model is largely new to the UK. This research evaluated audio quality in the context of a HyFlex technical environment. The paper provides a high-level overview of the process of designing a HyFlex solution and presents a detailed evaluation of the impact of reverberation in relation to the accuracy of automatically generated subtitles and the influence of microphone selection. The paper shows that there was a significant relationship between the reverberation, the audio quality, and the subtitling system, which is important as past studies highlighted audio quality is key for the students' experience. It presents a viable and simple methodology to estimate the audio quality on installed HyFlex systems to improve the students experience in a hybrid teaching environment

Impact that Acoustic Design has on Higher Education for Non-English Speaking Students

Speech is one of the main forms of communication, and in teaching environments is fundamental to transmit the message effectively. Significant amounts of the research that has been undertaken concentrating on measuring and studying the impact of intelligibility on native populations, particularly children. There is also evidence that the acoustic design of a room has impact on the overall student experience. This investigation therefore focuses in the analysis of the possible effects that acoustic design and characteristics of heritage buildings has in higher education environments; with a particular interest in those students whose English is not their first language. Rooms and people with similar characteristics from King's College London; were used as sample for the environmental and subjective evaluation respectively. The speech transmission index was assessed in accordance to BS IEC 60268-16:2011, while reverberation time was calculated in accordance with the recommendations for precision measurements in accordance to ISO 3382-2:2008 and ISO 18233:2006. The study compares the student experience subjective acoustic evaluation, their test marks with the measured Speech Transmission Index, as well as the result of a phonetically balanced word test. Results will be presented together with analysis as to if intelligibility correlates to student experience

Hybrid flexible (HyFlex) teaching and learning: climbing the mountain of implementation challenges for synchronous online and face-to-face seminars during a pandemic.

In 2020, King's College London introduced HyFlex teaching as a means to supplement online and face-to-face teaching and to respond to Covid-19 restrictions. This enabled teaching to a mixed cohort of students (both online and on campus). This article provides an outline of how such an approach was conceptualized and implemented in a higher-education institution during an intense three-month period over that summer and prior to the limited re-opening of the university campus. This was a new approach that offers a number of pointers for reflection and provides key insights in on this novel learning environment and the physical and pedagogical contexts in which learning can occur. Technical implementation factors are detailed, along with both reflections on challenges and solutions. Pedagogical issues such as cognitive load, social presence, and resolving the issues of a cohort spread across two locations are discussed. While we should be mindful of the limitations of this relatively-specific research, and shouldn't therefore over-extrapolate our findings, one key finding is that delivering Hyflex is associated with a higher cognitive load. Further, the audio quality of our implementation enhanced the feeling of presence in the learning environment. We recommend providing appropriate technical and pedagogical training, as well as audio-visual and digital education support. [Abstract copyright: © The Author(s) 2022.

Quality evaluation of microphones used for lecture captures in universities

Recently, lecture capture has become progressively more important to Higher Education institutions. They allow automated recordings of lectures to be taken and stored for consumption by remote students or students who wish to revise the class. The technology involved has become increasingly complex and hence the need to independently assess the quality of recordings made by the microphones. This paper describes a recent series of experiments carried out with microphones commonly used for the live recording of lectures in university teaching rooms. Two laboratory-based experiments were designed to compare the audio recordings from the microphones; using nine Audio Visual engineers, that currently assess the perceived quality of lecture capture at universities. The ratings of the recordings were captured on a five-point mean opinion scale (MOS). Two different approaches to recording were followed, i.e. using simultaneous recording and substitution. Results were analysed by correlation to investigate if there is a significant relationship between the measurements of each of the six microphones, when compared to results from a class 1 sound level meter, and the quality rating by the engineers