As Hybrid Learning Spaces move beyond distinctions between online and offline spaces, they challenge divisions between teacher/student roles, formal/informal contexts and analogue/digital communication and media. This article presents the concept of hybridity in higher education through a concrete example of a trans-national hybrid course collaboration between three teachers and thirty students at Aarhus University, Denmark and Åbo Akademi University, Finland. The course design is examined through theories on hybrid pedagogy, learning spaces and media ecology to suggest five design principles for Hybrid Learning Spaces. The paper argues that higher education has the potential of inviting students to learn in the world, with the world and for the world, in a way that cuts across traditional dichotomies and barriers.

This article investigates multidisciplinary teaching practices through models of General Didactics. Multidisciplinary education is gaining interest on international and national levels through policy reforms. Research on multidisciplinary teaching practices is often descriptive and there is a lack of theories to support teachers. General Didactics on the other hand builds on a long tradition of models and concepts (e.g., content, aims, and methods) relevant for the autonomous teacher who reflects on how to structure and execute the teaching practice. The didactic models of Wolfgang Klafki and Wolfgang Schulz were used when analysing two cases of multidisciplinary teaching in two Finnish primary schools. The question addressed is in what ways General Didactic principles, as defined by Klafki and Schulz, can be identified in the multidisciplinary teaching practices. The method of study is comparative, thematic analysis. The article suggests a theoretically and empirically informed didactic model for multidisciplinary teaching. Identified framing factors (school culture, collaboration, curricula) and shaping factors (subjects, competences, values and aims of education, student needs and interests, contemporary issues, methods) are included in the model for multidisciplinary teaching. The model may support teachers in planning and reflecting on multidisciplinary teaching. To strenghten its validity, the model needs to be empirically tested in different educational contexts.

The aim of the study is to identify and examine the distance teaching practices of four teachers in three small, rural primary schools in Finland – small in the sense that the schools consists of between 20–50 pupils and between 3–12 teachers. The schools have experienced a decline in pupil numbers, thus, they are not able to employ teachers full-time. The participating teachers imagined distance education as one solution to extend the classroom and faculty. Practice architectures is used as a theoretical and analytical framework to answer the question ‘What cultural, material, and social discourses constitute the development of the practice around distance education in small, rural primary schools?’ The data consists of interviews with and video blogs by the teachers recorded during 2016–2017. The implications are that cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements surrounding distance education are intertwined in small schools. Architectural arrangements enabled flexible solutions when developing distance education. The same arrangements proved to be material and cultural constraints as the teachers had many responsibilities in their everyday practice and support from the faculty was sometimes lacking. The teachers felt constrained by the technology and communicating with pupils at a distance meant they had to develop new teaching strategies.

This paper explores arrangements and conditions enabling and constraining teacher collaboration to extend classrooms through Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). It draws implications from a participatory action research project in three small, rural Finnish schools funded by the European Social Fund (2015–2017). Data were mainly collected through discussions and interviews with five teachers. The theory of practice architectures serves as a theoretical and analytical framework. The collaboration challenged and enabled cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements on three levels. On a classroom level, the VLE enabled new teaching practices (e.g., student collaboration, formative assessment). However, a lack of digital competence among teachers and students hindered the cross-classroom collaboration. On a school level, the school leaders enabled or constrained the arrangements depending on the provided support or lack thereof (e.g., schedules, faculty involvement). On a regional level, the infrastructure (e.g., transportation) for collaboration would require arrangements developed in dialogue with the schools (e.g., digital systems). The paper concludes that changing teaching practices in relation to VLEs requires slowly evolving previous and new architectures simultaneously on all three levels.