1 Introduction

An essential part of the transformation to a knowledge society is professional development. In this transformation, academia and industry need to have an ongoing investment in the development of human knowledge [1]. In the knowledge society, it requires developing and renewing knowledge, both within practices and from academic sources, throughout working life. In other words, for organisations continuous professional development (CPD) needs to be an ongoing process that continuously adapt to and change conditions and practices. Scholars discuss CPD as a process that can be described as "the systematic maintenance, improvement and broadening of knowledge and skills, and the development of personal qualities necessary for the execution of professional and technical duties throughout the practitioner's working life" [2]. For higher education, this is an important task.

Employers must create conditions for CPD that build on practical and theoretical knowledge. In effect, these conditions can be described as a continuum between a strong separation of practice and theory or the hybrid idea of CPD. On one end, CPD is built around a weak link between practice and theory. This end includes theoretical courses, with no link to practise, taught at the universities and practical knowledge—developed by chance or without a direct link to theoretical courses—at the workplace. At the other end of the continuum, CPD there is a strong link between practice and theory. This can be described as a hybrid form that includes the breeding of working life conditions in the workplace and conditions from academia [3]. This paper builds on hybrid conditions for CPD, including the importance of building on practitioners’ everyday working life and workplace activities. Moreover, these workplace conditions should be combined and merged with theoretical academic studies. Such hybrid conditions for CPD align with the idea of work-integrated learning (WIL) [4]. Today, many forms of WIL apply digital information and communication technologies to link academia and industry for supporting and facilitating teaching and learning activities in CPD.

WIL can open “for participation and engagement beyond the boundaries of the institution, classroom and learner role in new ways … [if] learners work to think ‘otherwise’ about time, space, materials, structures, contexts and roles to break down traditional dichotomies and make new forms emerge. Consequently, hybridity demands change in institutional practices, educational spaces and ways of learning” [3, p. 1714]. Therefore, a WIL that includes a strategic plan for change in the practices of an organisation can be regarded as having a hybrid character when the plan encompasses industry and academia.

For both academia and industry, applying digital information and communication technologies in WIL-based CPD enables individual design, schedules and an individual study pace. It also involves continuous access to qualified teachers. Further, it enables possibilities such as dynamic course content and the idea of more flexible teaching [5, 6]. Nevertheless, for participants with medium to low earlier experience of using digital information and communication technologies to enable learning, WIL in collaboration with academia is not completely self-explanatory or self-supported. Participants in CPD may need support in technology and pedagogy for CPD for navigating in CPD in academy and industry. As the need for WIL increases as well as the need for collaboration between academia and industry, higher education institutions will need more knowledge regarding how these participants can be supported.

2 Aim and research questions

The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the development of a support model for CPD in a WIL context combining academia and industry from the teacher perspective. The following research questions are explored: (1) How do higher education teachers describe the inception phases of a hybrid work-integrated continuous professional development effort? and (2) How can higher education teachers’ descriptions be analysed and understood as a model to support hybrid work-integrated continuous professional development? Thus, this paper explores a support model for hybrid work-integrated CPD.

3 The BUFFL project

The base of this paper is the BUFFL project (Translation of the Swedish acronym: Industry development at banks and insurance companies through flexible lifelong learning) [7, 8]. The project was a three-year project with the aim of strengthening professional competencies in the companies and organisation in the fields of banking and insurance. The BUFFL project can be classified as WIL as well as lifelong learning. The needed CPD in the project was carried out with the use of virtual technology-based methods to enable learning integrated with participants’ working life. Courses offered were divided into smaller course modules to be better adapted to the participants, who work full time. Thus, the BUFFL project offered employees to attend short courses to integrate theory and practice in academic course at their place of work. In the Swedish context, this type of CPD which integrates academia and industry in collaboration is relatively rare. Further the courses are offered several times, as organisations involved in the project seek to provide CPD for employees systematically over a longer period of time.

The course participants worked in six private companies and one governmental agency and worked together with researchers from Business Administration, Education and Informatics to develop a framework for work integration of short university course modules for authentic, needs-based CPD. During the ongoing development phase, the course modules were run in the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Moodle in collaboration between the various stakeholders. An important part of the educational framework was to create a support model for the teachers and course participants.

Sharing knowledge is an important part of a support model where academia could provide a knowledge-sharing structure that is aligned with the virtual classroom. Knowledge without skills is however not that valuable if it is not used and integrated in practice. In line with this thought, the use of own data has been used in the courses. This has meant that course participants have brought their own data to courses, in a form of Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) [9]. Collaborative sessions were scheduled during the course span, involving the idea that knowledge from lectures and course literature should be further investigated in concrete group activities. Practical work is aligned to present tools and theories in the BUFFL course modules. This work is crucial in order to meet the ambitious learning objectives on both individual and organisational development. In online learning environments, participants can experience feelings of loneliness, and group activities built around practical real-world problems seem like a good remedy to break the isolation. One rule in the BUFFL project, is to strive to have a minimum of at least two participants from each organisation for each course module.

4 The CHIM model

The preliminary model developed in the BUFFL project is the CHIM model. Previously, in the initial inception phase of the BUFFL project four crucial steps have been identified. The four steps are: Creating a common virtual space, the Handshake, the Initial support and the Mentorship. This preliminary model is a further development of the draft presented at the Networked Learning 2020 conference [7, 8]. This marked the start of the work to evaluate and more distinctly describe the support model.

The CHIM model contains the four steps of (1) Creating a common virtual space (2) Handshake, (3) Initial teacher support, and finally (4) Mentorship. Creating a common virtual space (C-step), involves the idea that learning activities are better carried out in dedicated learning spaces, and the classroom for learning has to be a virtual one. Here, teachers and participants may be new to the VLE. The implementation and design of teaching and learning activities should be an ongoing discussion which takes place between teachers and facilitating researchers, and which also involves the university technical support team. A virtual Handshake (H-step) might be even more important than an authentic handshake, as first contact is crucial. A poor handshake can result in learners in online courses quitting immediately [10, 11]. A remedy against a poor handshake is to have early facilitating meetings, either face-to-face or online [12], which leads to the next step of initial support. Initial support mitigates the C-step and the H-step. Initial support (I-step) for the teachers, for example, should start one semester before the start of the teacher’s first-course module. A thorough and friendly initial support can be a good stepping-stone toward a more long-lasting mentorship. Mentorship (M-step) comprises enabling and supporting conditions for networked learning among mentors and other participants in the project. Important ingredients in long-term mentorship are to exchange ideas, evaluate outcomes, and further to develop the course modules in a networked mentorship. This step should also include how mentors develop, create and expand networks to support individual work in mentorship with other mentors [7]. So far, the focus in the BUFFL project has been on the first four steps in the model. These four steps comprise the CHIM model, which was first presented in line with a study of the BUFFL project involving WIL in the bank and insurance sectors [7, 8]. Here, findings indicated that if technology-enhanced teaching and learning fail in the inception phase, early drop-out rates for participants can reach high levels.

In the fifth step of the CHIMP model, the P is for Practice in which academia and industry put new knowledge in place in practice. This step is built around the concept of CoP for This paper builds upon the previous work regarding the CHIM model in further efforts to explore, evaluate and expand the model. The research contribution is a model which can support the design of hybrid work-integrated CPD and create beneficial conditions for this work in higher education.

In the BUFFL project, the Communities of Practice (CoP) concept builds a foundation for involving the social learning theory that aligns learning with its social contexts, which in the CHIMP model means the workplace context. The educational theorist Etienne Wenger, who is one of the founders of CoP, has defined learning as a social process, and that CoP should be seen as a social learning theory [13]. This resembles how Bates [14] has claimed that knowledge is either acquired through a social process or through institutions that are socially constructed. According to the social learning theory, knowledge is constructed via social interaction, and learners learn from observing and interacting within social learning environments. A fundamental idea in the described BUFFL project and the CHIMP model, as described in Mozelius [15] is to have a multi-directed knowledge exchange between academia and the surrounding society. Finally, how the social learning theory is related to cognitivism, since it admits the existence of individual intelligence and reasoning [13], has also been part of the learning and teaching design in the BUFFL project.

5 Communities of practice

As noted above, during the 1990s, Wenger participated in the development of practice theory. First, the emphasis is on the situated nature of the relationship between learning and practice. This relationship is later expanded by digging deeper into how learning and practice relate to communities of learners. The theory was expanded to include the relationship between practices by emphasising learners’ participation in a nexus of practices. In practice, learning is a social phenomenon which depends on meaning-making and identity work within the practices a learner belongs to.

CoP as a concept has its roots in American pragmatism and was first presented by Lave and Wenger [16]. CoP builds upon John Dewey’s idea of “learning through occupation” [17]. The concept is defined as groups of people sharing a passion for something they do and having the interest to develop how they do it through regular interaction [18]. A CoP consists of members with a common responsibility for managing useful knowledge in a specific technical or business domain. Within a CoP, members communicate regularly to improve their skills in their common domain. This communication is organised in a user-friendly way with a minimum of formal structures or geographic boundaries.

CoPs should build upon informality, autonomy, open communication, and the importance of practitioner orientation. This concept was first implemented and tested as a part of teacher training, where CoP-members were introduced to peers and peer discussions. Furthermore, the idea of CoPs should involve the as involving an aspect of lifelong learning and providing and encouraging sustainable continuous learning process after the completion of formal training. Recommended CoP activities are: (1) Brainstorming and problem-solving, (2) Knowledge seeking and knowledge sharing, (3) Experience sharing, (4) The reuse of resources, (5) Development discussions, (6) Project documentation, (7) Identifying gaps and mapping knowledge, (8) Study visits and (9) Coordination for synergy [18, 19].

Later development of this practice theory included a shift from belonging in practices to the identification of a landscape of different practices. Professional occupation can be said to constitute is a “complex landscape of different communities of practice” [10, p. 15]. From such conceptualization, professional learning is an exploration of a landscape where the learner should be competent in practices identified as being significant to the learner and knowledgeable of the landscape. In this exploration, learners build their identities by identifying themselves in terms of engagement, imagination and alignment. Engagement is the direct experience of competencies in communities of practice. Imagination is the construction of images of the landscape. These images help learners to understand who they are in the landscape. Alignment can be regarded as a two-way process, which coordinate “enterprises, perspectives, interpretations, and contexts so that actions have the effects we expect” [10, p. 21].

The application of these modes of identification can lead to either misidentification or identification of practices and provide ways for learners to position themselves in the landscape. The combination of practices in the landscape supports the development of knowledgeability. Being a professional relates to the development of “a meaningful identity of both competence and knowledgeability in a dynamic and varied landscape of relevant practices” [10, p. 23]. The negotiation of professionals’ knowledgeability is an important challenge for CPD.

6 Method

Using a case study approach, this study was carried out with a total of 23 course modules in the BUFFL project as case units. Examples of courses are 'Digitalisation and business models' and 'Organisational development'. Data was collected in a combination of interviews and email conversations between teachers and course participants. The interviews were conducted as online interviews via email. The informants in the study were teachers for the various course modules. Seven teachers were interviewed, 6 men and one woman. The informants were identified as Interview Persons 1–7 (IP1-IP7).

Excerpts from course evaluations and e-mail correspondence were then analysed. The themes which emerged from the analyses of the various data sources were compared with the case study concepts of data triangulation and investigator triangulation. Firstly, data triangulation was conducted because "Different kinds of data may yield somewhat different results because different types of inquiry are sensitive to different real-world nuances" [19, p. 248]. Secondly, investigator triangulation was added with the idea of involving all authors in a triangulating analysis as described by Patton [20, p. 560] as "having two or more persons independently analyse the same qualitative data and compare their findings".

Striving for a systematic thematic analysis, the work was guided by the 6-step process recommended by Braun and Clarke [21, 22]. The six important steps to follow where (1) Get familiar with the data, (2) Find initial codes, (3) Search for themes, (4) Revise the identified themes, (5) Naming and refining the themes, and finally, (6) Write a report where the themes are presented and discussed [21, 22]. In the data analysis, the two triangulations described above were carried out to strengthen the general deductive thematic analysis. The results were then analysed using the CHIM Model. The results from the different data sources were compared and grouped into five categories. The categories that were defined beforehand are the four CHIM steps that were found in an earlier study [23]. The fifth category is 'Suggestions for improvements in practice', which contains ideas on a more long-term and sustainable practical collaboration that should have the potential to survive the project span.

7 Results

In this section, the results are presented in line with the CHIM model. These themes are: creating a common virtual space, the handshake, the initial support and the mentorship. Suggestions for improvements in practices are also presented. First, the interviews are presented (IP1-IP7), followed by e-mail correspondence.

7.1 Creating a common virtual space

Creating a common virtual space, i. e. creating a common workplace to work together and support networked learning, was an important base for collaborative work with CPD. This common virtual space was a work space for the teachers involved in the project who were preparing for the upstart of their courses. In this process, there were university teachers assigned to act as mentors to support the teachers' work. All of the course modules were developed in the university’s VLE. The courses were developed with the support of the university technical support team.

In this step, creating and developing the new course modules in the VLE proved to be a challenge. The course teachers in the organisations involved needed to be registered in the system. University work routines as well as strict administrative rules created barriers for the teachers as external users. As external users they were not considered to be students in the academic sense in the system. As one of the teachers explained about userids and passwords which must work: “To have to wait for a week just to be able to get into the VLE… This was extremely frustrating for both teachers and participants” (IP3.) Other barriers included a lack of information about the project among administrators who, understandably, found it difficult to comprehend the project design and the need for flexible routines for connecting teachers and users to the VLE:

For the participants and for me, the design of my profile and what I have access to should be completely steered by the process. There shouldn’t be any documents that have to be sent out, just an e-mail, which most people have, so all administration for my participants should be able to be done by email. I should be able to reset my password without needing to contact IT support, and the password should be the same for e-mail and VLE. (IP1)

In this light, university protocol and administrative systems were compared to existing protocols and administrative systems in the organisations.

The e-mail conversations indicate a certain irritation toward the bureaucracy that surrounds the VLE administration. E-mails are formulated politely, but the inertia in the process is not appreciated. A detail that was questioned was that a course room cannot be created without a course id number and a course session id number and that these numbers only can be set after the official syllabus is approved. This clashes with the idea that most teachers and course developers want to start early with the fundamental course design.

7.2 The handshake

The first phase, or the inception phase, is important. However, if the initial handshake fails, the result may lead to low levels of motivation. This may also lead to a high dropout rate among first-time participants. In the initial contact with technology-supported education and VLE’s, there are challenges which go beyond the learning content itself.

The need to deal with technology and the VLE interface may also cause frustration and cognitive overload. This may be due to administrative routines, for example, the distribution of account information to online participants who are not normal university students. The initial handshake and early in-person or virtual joint sessions are necessary to establish contact and collaboration with participants and teachers. Although this can be considered to be a basic action and can be carried out face-to-face or by videoconferencing, it is an important step. Here, teachers may also need support in getting started. One teacher expressed this frustration: Another teacher noted: “It is mainly the registration of the participants which must be done earlier and faster” (IP7). That login work is important (IP6). The same is true for information about how to access the VLE and what support functions are available (IP5).

The same was true in regard to the teachers learning to teach in environments which are supported by technologies. Therefore, it would have been better to address the initial problems through the corresponding initial support: “The administration for all sorts of things for supporting the participants to get into the VLE and use it, some participants need more [support] than others” (IP2). How teachers and participants experienced the usability of the VLE differed: “Overall, the VLE has worked very well and has not had any larger problems in using the platform. Further, I feel that the participants find the VLE easy to use” (IP7).

One teacher explained the challenges in the manual administration of participants and the need for central storage: “So far, NN and I have emailed lists between us. This should be changed, so that the necessary information can be found centrally and that I, as a teacher, should only have to fill in the necessary information in this central system” (IP1).

More systematic and digitalized routines alleviate these challenges. Another teacher noted the difficulties related to a lack of technical competence:

For me, all of the preparations are carried out correctly so that things work since you don’t understand what the problem is when you don’t have the competence: “the most important thing is quick and competent support” (IP4).

Many e-mails have been sent, followed up by phone calls in the strife to get all participants into the virtual classroom before the course start. Some course participants reacted early and had a continuous dialogue with the facilitators until they were able to log in. However, there were late responders as well, and the combination of course-starts on Mondays and a closed IT helpdesk on Fridays were, on several occasions, a bad combination. This issue will be addressed for future BUFFL courses, but as a course participant wondered in an e-mail: "Why is it more complicated to log in to the VLE than to my Internet bank?".

7.3 The initial support

The value of an initial support group should not be underestimated. This is especially true if the majority of the teachers in the teacher community are new in working with technology-supported teaching and learning activities. In the BUFFL project a major part of the initial training has been to offer technical training and support for the VLE as well as the employed video conferencing tool ZOOM. In order to achieve realistic training sessions for the use of the ZOOM tool, the larger part of the initial distance support for teachers was carried out as ZOOM sessions. Two members of the support group carried out a workshop which was conducted in a face-to-face format and which involved hands-on activities. This was necessary especially for one of the collaborating universities for project participants, which did not have previous experience with tools for technology-enhanced learning. One teacher expressed this: “For me, the most important thing is that I know who is responsible if I have questions… For the participants, there needs to be clear instructions about how to use the VLE” (IP2).

Alternative and supplementary forms of initial support were also provided. The initial support was planned to offer pedagogical support, technical instructions, study guides, and examples of an online assessment. Although all teachers have previous pedagogical knowledge, teaching with the help of digital technologies requires a modified instructional design: “Pedagogical and didactical possibilities connected to functions in the VLE.” (IP5). Technical instructions which were clear and concise were also needed in order to initiate the work with tools for recording lectures, video conferencing tools such as ZOOM and the VLE itself. Learners who have not previously studied online or used VLEs may be supported through the use of study guides. These study guides were aimed to illustrate and explain aspects such as course design, collaboration tools and navigation in the VLE. However, teachers may need more support to increase pedagogical competence: “I have done a course in higher education and flexible Learning, but my experience is that I need to study more in the area of pedagogy” (IP2). In the same line as study guides provide support, the development of online assignments also differs from the construction of traditional in-class assignments. For example, VLE modules for peer review may be far from self-explanatory. Therefore, both teachers and learners may need support.

7.4 The mentorship

Noting that the initial support is an important pillar at the start of a project such as the BUFFL project, support through mentorship is also important. This work involves creating beneficial conditions for learning within the project group. The project group as a CoP [24] can be described as comprising three levels. Creating conditions for learning among mentors, which can be seen as the first level, is important in order to have possibilities to exchange, evaluate and develop the work in mentorship. This form of mentorship provides support for the teachers in the different organisations. One teacher saw mentorships as a way to “increase the accessibility to support, so this would be positive (IP4). This level comprises how mentors develop and create networks to support individual work though practicing mentorship in collaboration with other mentors. One teacher saw the idea of mentorships for teachers and participants:

Regarding subject content, I think it [mentorship] is a good idea for participants. A mentor can be a teacher or an expert in the content area in the company at hand. This would also be a way to create better continuity after the courses are finished. However, is also possible that the same effect could be seen by creating a network or networks of course participants. (IP3)

The second level comprises how mentors, through their mentorship, support conditions for learning for teachers working on the courses. In viewing mentorship as a community of practice these conditions are also vital for collaboration between mentors: “I am not sure what is meant by my mentorship…. But a group for discussion experiences, etc., would be of help” (IP6).

As the project continues, the third level, it will be important that conditions for learning are created for both mentors and teachers. Mentors and teachers need to share, exchange experiences, collaborate and development work in the intersection between mentorship and teaching. As one teacher expressed this: “I have a positive view of both pedagogical and technical mentorship” (IP7). Thus, mentorship in different forms appears to be supportive for both teachers' and participants' learning.

7.5 Suggestions for improvements in practice

When the teachers were asked to provide suggestions for participation in practice, the importance of support function, pedagogical and technical development were noted as well as alignment and the balance between theory and practice. Processes and support were important to develop: “A more systematic work process with support functions” (IP1). Technical development was also noted as a point for development: “Interactive platforms and gamification are very important” (IP2). Marketing was also seen to be an important take off the academic stamp on the courses: “Much better IT-support and better marketing. The latter, I think, can be experienced as academic and boring since it is very important to get participants to the courses. I think that this is something that should be financed for professional support” (IP3). Another teacher expressed this as the balance between theory and practice which was a part of the course content and which needed to be considered and evaluated: “The balance between theory and practice (practical problems) in the courses concerning the content, given the group of participants, is something to think about” (IP5). Other recommendations in practice were alignment: “Overall, to align the design and requirements levels for different types of modules could be necessary” (IP4) and better conditions for the participants: “Giving the participants prerequisites in the form of time for them to be able to participate in a proper way” (IP7).

8 Discussion

The aim of this paper was to describe and analyse the development of a support model for hybrid CPD in a WIL context combining academia and industry from the teacher perspective. The following research questions were explored (1) How do higher education teachers describe the inception phases of a hybrid work-integrated continuous professional development effort? and (2) How can higher education teachers’ descriptions be analysed and understood as a model to support hybrid work-integrated continuous professional development? In reference to the first research question, higher education teachers describe the inception phases of a hybrid work-integrated CPD effort through identifying professional occupation as a complex landscape of different communities of practice professional learning involves teachers supporting learners to explore and understand a landscape as a landscape of practice. This might in the future also be aligned to the concept of Communities of Inquiry, and especially the part of social presence and the suggested extension of emotional presence [25].

In reference to the second research question, higher education teachers’ descriptions can be analysed and understood as a model to support hybrid work-integrated CPD through the CHIMP model. The preliminary model in the BUFFL project has been described as the CHIM model. In the inception phase of a BUFFL project four crucial steps were identified. The four steps, as noted above, are: Creating a common virtual space, the Handshake, the Initial support and the Mentorship [23]. Thus, regarding the BUFFL project as a project for CPD and WIL, the learner explores and understands a landscape in the first two steps of the model, i.e. are the C-and the H-steps. Engagement can be seen in first two steps in the CHIM model: the C-step and the H-step. The study by Hesterman [26] highlighted the importance of a digital handshake to support authentic online learning and to create a contract between the teacher and the students. In these two steps, engagement is present in the direct experience of competencies in communities of practice. These steps were crucial aspects for teacher and learners in the project.

In this study, engagement can be said to be the direct experiences of competencies in the communities of practice as a common virtual space is created and the initial handshake is carried out as a common agreement between teachers and learners. Regarding the engagement, there are several other research studies that has pointed out that highly engaged students have significantly better learning outcomes and grades than those with low engagement levels [27, 28].

In the third step of the model, the I-step, learners learn to acknowledge and make use of the initial support provided. As stated by Hasan [29] it is obvious that the learners need initial support to explore e-learning effectively. Here, imagination is the construction of images of the landscape in order to navigate and support learners in navigating in the landscape. In the fourth step, the M-step, teachers support learners, and each other, working together to create common ground. The study by Vauterin & Virrki-Hatakka [30] identified how the mentors' teaching and research expertise were noticed in their practical work. Here, alignment is defined as “a two-way process of coordinating enterprises, perspectives, interpretations, and contexts so that actions have the effects we expect” [16, p. 21]. As argued by Bernhard and Olsson [31], alignment is of importance when the negotiation of teachers’ and professionals’ knowledgeability is a challenge for CPD, especially when academia meets industry.

Sharing knowledge is an important part of a support model where academia could provide a knowledge-sharing structure aligned with the virtual classroom. However, knowledge without skills is not that valuable, and in the fifth step of the CHIMP model, the P is for Practice. This step is built around the concept of CoP for collaborative sessions during the course span, involving the idea that knowledge from lectures and course literature should be further investigated in concrete group activities. In regard to the practical work carried out in courses it is crucial that this work and is aligned to the presented tools and theories in the BUFFL course modules. Otherwise, there is a risk that the ambitious learning objectives for individual and organisational development are not met. In online learning environments, participants can experience feelings of loneliness. Group activities built around practical, real-world problems appear to be a remedy to break the isolation and to create new landscapes of practice. One rule in the BUFFL project was to have a minimum of two participants from each organisation for each course module. This is a good start for the creation of local CoPs, but the long-term objective is cross-organisational and cross-boundary collaboration in Landscapes of Practice.

9 Conclusion

The findings in this study confirm several of our ideas about a support model for work-integrated CPD [7, 8, 23]. Moreover, the findings confirm the need of expanding the support model to involve another fifth step, the extension from a CHIM to a CHIMP model seems like an important and probably last step. It is most likely that this final step, the longer term, will be of importance in order to phase out the BUFFL project support, for a creation of sustainable Communities and Landscapes of Practice that can survive the project span. This final step offers further for support for CHIMP as a model for hybrid work-integrated CPD. With the final step of the CHIMP model, the model may be used in future work to support the work with implementing hybrid work-integrated CPD for industry. Further, the model can support the work in higher education to design and implement courses in collaboration with industry as the interest in society for hybrid courses increases.

10 Future research

Future research will include the study of the BUFFL course modules from the teacher and course participant perspectives using the CHIMP model. Evaluations of course module questionnaires should be combined with interviews with teachers and facilitators that have been involved in the course modules. Another idea for future research could be to investigate how Communities and Landscapes of Practice could be integrated with the concept of Communities of Inquiry.