Hybrid Learning Environments

This paper deals with the problematic nature of the transition between education and the workplace. Asmooth transition between education and the workplace requires learners to develop an integratedknowledge base, but this is problematic as most educational programmes offer knowledge and experiencesin a fragmented manner, scattered over a variety of subjects, modules and (work) experiences. Toovercome this problem, we propose a design approach and shifting the educational focus of attention fromindividual learners to learning environments. The broader notion of learning environments facilitatestransitions by establishing horizontal connections between schools and the workplace.The main argument of this paper is that combining or connecting aspects of school-based settings onlyis not sufficient to ensure learners will develop an integrated knowledge base. The concept and examples of“hybrid learning environment” show how formal, school-based learning and workplace experiences can beclosely connected. The paper offers a framework of four coherent perspectives that can help to understandthe complex nature of such environments and to design hybrid learning environments: the “agencyperspective”, the “spatial perspective”, the “temporal perspective”, and the “instrumental perspective”. Theframework is applied to three cases taken from vocational education in the Netherlands to describe whathybrid learning environments look like in contemporary educational practice.