How Online, In-Person, and Hybrid Adult Numeracy Classes Work

September 30, 2026

By Brent Jackson and Haley McNamara

At first glance, you might think you are seeing three different courses when you look in on three different Adult Numeracy in the Digital Era (ANDE) classrooms.

In Lucy’s class, students meet entirely online. In Mere’s, five or six students are gathered around tables. In Maxine’s, the two arrangements coexist: Some students are in the room, others are on Zoom, and any given student might attend one way this week and the other the next.

ANDE is designed to be taught in all three ways—online, in person, and hybrid. That flexibility matters for adult learners, whose work, caregiving, and transportation realities don’t always accommodate a fixed seat in a predetermined room.

Although the modality may change across the classrooms, key components of the learning experience are consistent. In all three modalities, adult learners engage in rich mathematical discourse as they develop real understanding. They compare solutions, defend their reasoning, and take up one another’s methods. The modality shapes how that talk is organized; it does not determine whether it happens.

Online: Lucy’s Classroom

Lucy teaches ANDE entirely online, and her session begins before any group conversation does. As learners log in to her Zoom room, those who haven’t finished the day’s prep are directed to the ANDE platform, where a short diagnostic quiz pinpoints the prerequisite lessons each learner needs and delivers targeted mini-lessons. When a learner answers incorrectly, the platform provides feedback by offering a hint or a full explanation. While the software handles that feedback, Lucy meets with learners who need more, asking questions rather than handing over answers—as she sees it, keeping the focus on the students’ thinking. This preparatory phase is individual by design: It is the on-ramp that ensures that every learner arrives at the next portion of the lesson ready to take part.

Then the room comes together. Lucy launches the lesson with an ANDE signature routine—for example, comparing two solved problems that use double number lines. The routine gets learners talking about what they notice, building an understanding of the representation not as an answer-getting trick but as a tool for thinking, and Lucy presses them to clarify what they mean and why.

In Person: Mere’s Classroom

Mere teaches ANDE face-to-face, sitting around tables. Her session opens much as Lucy’s does: Students arrive, grab computers, and work through the same individual prep in the platform while she circulates to help. The on-ramp is the same; only the setting has changed. What the physical room adds is ease of conversation: with just five or six students who have grown comfortable together, turn-taking takes care of itself, and ideas move in a natural flow.

A collaborative task like the Farmer’s Market problem (Lesson B2)—staying within a set budget—shows what this looks like. Because it has no single right answer, each pair lands somewhere different: One drops an item from the list, another reduces quantities. That is what “something worth talking about” means—an open task that produces genuinely different, defensible responses.

Mere turns those differences into a whole-class conversation, asking one person from each pair to explain how they know that they came in under budget and writing their computations on the board. When one pair has subtracted items from the total, and another has re-added the numbers from scratch, she puts both on the board, notes that there is more than one valid path, and has students use each other’s methods to confirm that the answers hold.

Hybrid: Maxine’s Classroom

Maxine’s ANDE class is hybrid—HyFlex, to be precise. Students may attend in person or virtually, and some switch between sessions. Structurally, her class runs like Lucy’s and Mere’s; what sets it apart is the care she takes to keep two modalities from becoming two separate classes.

During small-group collaboration, she groups students by how they are attending—Zoom together, in-person together—a practical fix for the tangle of overlapping audio that multiple Zoom speakers create in one room.

But she does not let the class stay divided. When she pulls everyone together for the whole-class discussion, she leans on a shared digital whiteboard visible to everyone and scribes what students say as they say it, so that both groups watch the same thinking take shape.

Then she works the seam on purpose—posing a question to one group and asking the other to respond, having an in-person student restate what a virtual student just shared. That small move forces the two halves of the room to listen to each other, making the mathematics, not the mode of attendance, what everyone is oriented to. Afterward, the room looks like the others again: students return to their computers for individual practice.

The Same Instructional Design Across Every Modality

Underneath their different textures, all three rooms run the same ANDE structure: individual preparatory work,the collaborative lesson, anda closing practice assignment.

1. It begins with individual preparatory work on the platform, where a diagnostic routes each learner to the mini-lessons they need with immediate feedback—the on-ramp that readies everyone to participate.
2. Next comes the collaborative lesson, the heart of the course: A signature routine gives students a shared object to reason about, and they talk their way through the mathematics in pairs, trios, or as a group. This is where the discourse lives and where the component modality most visibly shapes the experience—a Zoom launch in Lucy’s room, small tables in Mere’s, a bridged whiteboard in Maxine’s. The organization changes; the discourse does not.
3. Finally, a closing practice assignment aligned with the GED consolidates the day’s ideas. Usually geared toward individuals, it too can become discourse: In a “test talk,” the class works a released GED-style question aloud, reasoning through why an answer choice isn’t plausible. Even test prep becomes an occasion for reasoning rather than rote drilling.

There is strong evidence that the ANDE design works. Early results from a WestEd study comparing ANDE classrooms to standard course classrooms suggest that the design supports stronger learning outcomes. Full findings are available in a forthcoming study paper.

Working Together to Make ANDE Work

Three conditions—conditions program leaders are positioned to put in place—make the classrooms in this piece work.

The first is managed enrollment through focused mini-courses rather than the open-entry, open-exit model common in adult education. A group moving through a coherent sequence together is what makes shared discourse possible; it is hard to build when the roster changes weekly.

The second is rich, purposefully sequenced content, so that each lesson builds on the last, letting the prep work function as a real on-ramp and the collaborative tasks reach for genuine reasoning.

The third—and most demanding—is professional development that shifts teaching practice. Adult numeracy is often delivered as one-to-one tutoring; ANDE asks instructors to launch routines, orchestrate whole-class discussion, and make thinking public. That change does not happen on its own; it takes sustained support to move from a tutoring model toward ambitious, discourse-rich instruction.

What This Means for Your Program

Lucy’s Zoom room, Mere’s tables, and Maxine’s hybrid mix are, on the surface, three different places to learn. Yet in each, students share the same experience: comparing methods, defending their reasoning, and talking their way toward real mathematical understanding. While the setting bends to fit learners’ lives, the mathematical thinking at the center holds steady. That is what makes ANDE worth a program leader’s attention: The modality can follow what learners need because it is not the modality that carries the learning. It is the design beneath it.

Interested in bringing ANDE to your program, whether online, in person, or hybrid? Connect with our team to learn how ANDE and its professional learning can support your adult numeracy instruction.

About the Authors

Dr. Brent Jackson is a Research Manager in mathematics education who has taught middle school mathematics and was the professional development lead for the Adult Numeracy in the Digital Era project.

Haley McNamara is a Research Manager in mathematics education who has over a decade of experience supporting mixed-methods research projects and Networked Improvement Communities focused on mathematics.