The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated remote working and working at the office. This hybrid working is an indispensable part of today's life even within Agile Software Development (ASD) teams. Before COVID-19 ASD teams were working closely together in an Agile way at the office. The Agile Manifesto describes 12 principles to make agile working successful. These principles are about working closely together, face-to-face contact and continuously responding to changes. To what extent does hybrid working influence these agile principles that have been indispensable in today's software development since its creation in 2001? Based on a quantitative study within 22 Dutch financial institutions and 106 respondents, the relationship between hybrid working and ASD is investigated. The results of this research show that human factors, such as team spirit, feeling responsible and the ability to learn from each other, are the most decisive for the success of ASD. In addition, the research shows that hybrid working creates a distance between the business organization and the IT department. The findings are valuable for Managers, HR professionals and employees working in the field of ASD as emphasizing and fostering Team Spirit, Learning Ability, and a Sense of Responsibility among team members can bolster the Speed of ASD.
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Seven college lecturers and two senior support staff were interviewed during 2021 about their experiences teaching in hybrid virtual classrooms (HVC). These technology-rich learning environments allow teachers to simultaneously teach students who are in class (on campus) and students who are joining remotely (online). There were two reasons for this choice: first, ongoing experimentation from innovative teaching staff who were already using this format before the COVID-19 pandemic; secondly, as a possible solution to restrictions on classroom size imposed by the pandemic. Challenges lecturers faced include adjusting teaching practice and lesson delivery to serve students in the class and those online equally; engaging and linking the different student groups in structured and natural interactions; overcoming technical challenges regarding audio and visual equipment; suitably configuring teaching spaces and having sufficient pedagogical and technical support to manage this complex process. A set of practical suggestions is provided. Lecturers should make reasoned choices when teaching in this format since it requires continued experimentation and practice to enhance the teaching and learning opportunities. When external factors such as classroom size restrictions are the driving force, the specific type of synchronous learning activities should be carefully considered. The structure and approach to lessons needs to be rethought to optimise the affordances of the hybrid virtual and connected classroom. The complexity of using these formats, and the additional time needed to do it properly, should not be underestimated. These findings are consistent with previous literature on this subject. An ongoing dialogue with faculty, support staff and especially students should be an integral part of any further implementation in this format.
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With artificial intelligence (AI) systems entering our working and leisure environments with increasing adaptation and learning capabilities, new opportunities arise for developing hybrid (human-AI) intelligence (HI) systems, comprising new ways of collaboration. However, there is not yet a structured way of specifying design solutions of collaboration for hybrid intelligence (HI) systems and there is a lack of best practices shared across application domains. We address this gap by investigating the generalization of specific design solutions into design patterns that can be shared and applied in different contexts. We present a human-centered bottom-up approach for the specification of design solutions and their abstraction into team design patterns. We apply the proposed approach for 4 concrete HI use cases and show the successful extraction of team design patterns that are generalizable, providing re-usable design components across various domains. This work advances previous research on team design patterns and designing applications of HI systems.
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This article proposes a model for the design of a hybrid VET curriculum across the school-work boundary.
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Full text via link. In September 2015, a four year project on the working alliance with mandated clients started. The project was facilitated by a RAAK-PRO grant of the Dutch Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) and carried out by researchers of the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht. The project has been set up throughout several areas of the forensic social field: probation, labor reintegration, debt counseling, social care and youth services. The idea came as a response to the ambivalent feelings professionals in mandated contexts express regarding the combination of controlling and coaching tasks they need to employ. They sometimes struggle with ‘hybrid working’ in one-to-one supervision with clients. Professionals claim they need theory-based knowledge on how to build a working alliance with mandated clients on which they can build their daily practice.
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We report research into the evolvement of a hybrid learning environment where education, companies and government successfully cooperate. This hybrid learning environment—one of the latest inventions in curriculum design—is special because it was neither intended nor planned by the parties involved. With some self-astonishment, the participants in this research experienced a growing acknowledgement of their emerging educational creation, aside from the experience of and appreciation for their cooperation and the increasing turnover. With a bricolage research approach within the scope of a rhizomatic perspective on becoming, a multivocal perspective on the evolvement of the learning environment was pursued. In emphasizing the historical evolvement of the learning environment, our findings challenge the tradition of drawing board design, accompanied by an appeal for re-appreciating professional craftsmanship. In addition, some reflections regarding the research are discussed.
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Present-day students are expected to be lifelong learners throughout their working life. Higher education must therefore prepare students to self-direct their learning beyond formal education, in real-life working settings. This can be achieved in so-called hybrid learning configurations in which working and learning are integrated. In such a learning configuration, learning is typically trans-boundary in nature and embedded in ill-structured, authentic tasks. The goal of this study is to develop a set of design guidelines for an intervention that would strengthen students’ capacity for self-directed lifelong learning within a hybrid learning configuration, a one-semester elective course at a university of applied sciences in the Netherlands. The research approach was educational design research. An intervention was designed, implemented and evaluated during two iterations of the course. Evaluation methods included interviews with students and the course facilitator, questionnaires, and students’ logs and reports. We developed five intervention design guidelines that will promote self-directed learning. Our conclusion is that the intervention was usable and effective: at a basic level, the students did develop their capacity for self-directed lifelong learning. Further research is needed to investigate conditions for realizing higher levels of proficiency in self-directed lifelong learning throughout the curriculum and beyond.
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Vocational education and training (VET) plays a central role in preparing young people for work, developing adequate skills and responding to the labour-market needs of the economy. The transition learners are required to make from education to the workplace is a complex, and often problematic, process (Tynjälä, Välimaa, & Sarja, 2003). Studies show a gap between what is learned and what is required of competent professionals in an ever more complex world (Baartman & De Bruijn, 2011). The integration of students? learning experiences across academic and practice settings is currently of considerable interest within the educational sectors in a number of countries (Billett, 2011), among which the Netherlands. The last decade Dutch VET institutes haven been experimenting to design learning environments that cross the traditional school boundaries into working life. Zitter (2010) introduced the term hybrid learning environments . "A learning environment can be considered as a hybrid learning environment? When different formal and informal elements are woven together into coherent programmes of learning and into single learning environments, rather than a programme that combines different components with the aim of offering a more enticing menu of learning for the students" (Zitter & Hoeve, 2012 in OECD, 2013, pp. 138).
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All over the world entrepreneurs drive changes. They develop new products and services, inspire others and take decisions that result in growth of their businesses. But the world around entrepreneurs is changing and so are entrepreneurs. Life-long selfemployment or permanent wage employment are of the past. And the way people perceive self-employment is changing as well. And so must our thinking. Changes in our society call for policies and programmes in support of enterprising people. Diversity, mobility and connectivity offer new opportunities for enterprising people. Markets are changing, become more accessible and there is less need to be bound physically to one place for an entrepreneur. New avenues for business are open thanks to our improved access to information, our connectivity globally through social media and our ability to travel freely and frequently from one country to another. With less focus on life-long (self) employment people now combine paid work (or unpaid – house- work) with self-employment, or opt for just parttime entrepreneurship. New, hybrid forms of enterprising emerge. This combining of work with self-employment is rather common in developing countries, but in Europe it is a phenomenon not yet reported on in statistics and for which policy makers and service providers have no answers yet. Neither exist clear definitions or classifications. This book may serve as an eye-opener: hybrid entrepreneurs are indeed around us and deserve our attention. The research unit Financial Inclusion and New Entrepreneurship of The Hague University of Applied Science challenges policy makers, academics and service providers (such as educational institutes, business advisers and financial institutions) to pay more attention to hybrid entrepreneurs, those enterprising people who intend to create new values for a fair and sustainable society. They might not yet been seen, but they exist…..
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