Higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly expected to diversify their campus-based teaching formats through hybrid and fully online offerings (EUA, 2021). Such diversification is viewed as essential for addressing growing educational inequalities and responding to urgent societal challenges such as rural depopulation and lack of skilled labour. These policy imperatives are now shaping national and local educational landscapes also in the Nordic, compelling HEIs to reinterpret and operationalise education within their specific linguistic, cultural, and geographical contexts. Hybrid educational arrangements—integrating physical and digital, onsite and online learning—hold great potential in this regard (Pöysä-Tarhonen, 2025, 2026).

This conceptual paper examines hybrid education in regional HEIs, specifically in the Nordic context. While Nordic higher education is widely recognised for its strong commitment to equity, accessibility, and social inclusion (e.g. Buchholtz et al., 2020), HEIs in regional centres and smaller towns often operate under distinct conditions compared to their counterparts in major urban centres. These HEIs are typically characterised by smaller scale, more dispersed student populations, and a greater integration with local communities. As such, they carry a dual mandate: to promote equitable access to tertiary education across geographically diverse populations, and simultaneously, to contribute to local and regional vitality (Nordregio, 2024). In this context, hybridity is framed not only as a pedagogical question but also as a critical dimension of making higher education economically viable in sparsely populated areas. However, while these institutions are tasked with balancing widening participation and local and regional development, their distinct conditions are still underrepresented in dominant policy narratives and educational research. Accordingly, the central research question guiding this paper is: How can hybrid education be (re)conceptualised as a spatially responsive educational practice in regional HEIs?

To address the research question, the paper draws on three intersecting theoretical perspectives. First, adopting a postdigital lens (e.g. Ryberg, 2025), the paper challenges simplistic binaries between ‘the physical’ and ‘the digital’, viewing them instead as co-constitutive dimensions of hybrid educational spaces (Gourlay, 2021). In practice, both online and onsite learners navigate entangled spaces of physical and digital that shape their learning and belonging (Lamb & Carvalho, 2024). Within this view, students are not passive recipients but active curators of their learning spaces, assembling spatial, temporal, and technological resources in ways that reflect their responsibilities and lived realities (Lamb & Carvalho, 2024). These curatorial practices, however, are deeply shaped by (uneven) access to infrastructure, varying levels of digital fluency and life conditions of students (Mineshima-Lowe et al., 2023). Second, the paper draws from geographies of education (e.g., Fløisdorf & Adriansen, 2022; Kraftl et al., 2025) to better understand how space, place, and institutional practices intersect in shaping hybrid learning, especially in HEIs outside urban areas. In hybrid education offered by regional HEIs, where campus-based communities can be fragmented and part-time or commuting students are common (e.g., Hill et al., 2024), sustaining interaction and connection among students and between students and educators can prove challenging. This raises questions e.g. how to foster relational depth across dispersed spatial and temporal arrangements and requires rethinking of hybrid forms of university participation anew, extending from binary thinking of student mobilities (e.g., ‘staying local’ and ‘going away’, Finn, 2017) to recognising multiple narratives of human and spatial relationships (e.g., Gravett & Ajjawi, 2021). Third, insights from the sociology of education and critical policy studies are used to interrogate the possible tensions between institutional visions of digital transformation and the everyday realities of hybrid teaching and learning in regional HEIs (e.g., Gourlay, 2025). Yet such framings often obscure the lived realities of educational practice, where structural constraints and everyday challenges are pronounced (Rüsselbæk Hansen & Phelan, 2023). For instance, institutional expectations surrounding hybrid educational models may conflict with operational realities, including limited staff resources, and a lack of continuity between online and on-campus components if students navigate multiple locations, platforms, and temporal rhythms. Throughout, the different theoretical perspectives are not examined in isolation but rather analysed as interdependent. Together, they offer a more nuanced lens through which to understand the lived practices and structural dynamics shaping hybrid education in Nordic regional HEIs and beyond.

This paper advances a conceptual reframing of hybrid learning in regional HEIs by positioning hybridity as a spatial, relational, and institutional phenomenon. The central contribution lies in developing a theoretical lens that illuminates how hybrid learning is co-constructed through the interplay of everyday practices, material conditions, and policy narratives. Rather than viewing hybrid education solely as a mode of delivery or technological advancement, the paper argues for a broader understanding that acknowledges how hybrid learning spaces are co-constructed through everyday practices, material conditions, and institutional policy visions. In doing so, the paper invites researchers, educators and policymakers to move beyond abstract design principles to better account for the complexity of hybrid educational arrangements in regional HEIs. These include, for instance, the spatial and technological constraints shaping learner agency, the relational and affective dimensions of participation, and the alignment—or misalignment—between policy-level imaginaries of digital transformations of HEIs and institutional or regional capacities and their everyday educational practices.

Buchholtz, N., Stuart, A., & Frønes, T. S. (2020). Equity, equality and diversity: Putting educational justice in the Nordic model to a test. In T. S. Frønes, A. Pettersen, J. Radišić, & N. Buchholtz (Eds.), Equity, equality and diversity in the Nordic model of education (pp. 13–41). Springer. EUA. (2021). Universities without walls: A vision for 2030. Finn, K. (2017). Multiple, relational and emotional mobilities: Understanding student mobilities in higher education as more than ‘staying local’ and ‘going away’. British Educational Research Journal, 43(5), 743–758. Fløisdorf, U., & Adriansen, H. (2022). Continuity and change of internationalisation during the pandemic. Journal of international Mobility, 10(1), 15-34. Gourlay, L. (2021). There is no ‘virtual learning’: The materiality of digital education. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 10, 57–66. Gourlay, L. (2025). University and the Algorithmic Gaze. Bloomsbury Academic. Gravett, K., & Ajjawi, R. (2021). Belonging as situated practice. Studies in Higher Education, 47(7), 1386–1396. Hill, J., King, A., Hemmings, B., Cocks, T., & Millican, R. (2024). Commuting students before and during COVID-19: Academic identity across home and campus spaces. Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 26(1), 90–112. Kraftl, P., Andrews, W., Beech, S., Ceresa, G., Holloway, S. L., Johnson, V., & White, C. (2022). Geographies of education: A journey. Area, 54(1), 15-23. Lamb, J., & Carvalho, L. (2024). Towards harmonious, positive, postdigital spaces for learning. In J. Lamb & L. Carvalho (Eds.), Postdigital learning spaces: Towards convivial, equitable and sustainable spaces for learning (pp. 225–242). Springer. Mineshima-Lowe, D., Mihai, A., Le Bourdon, M., Pears, L., Bijsmans, P., Hadjipieris, P., & Lightfoot, S. (2023). Hyflex and hybrid teaching and learning in higher education: Evolving discussions in the post-pandemic era. European Political Science. Nordregio. (2024). Higher education beyond major urban areas in the Nordics: EDYNORE final report 2024. Pöysä-Tarhonen, J. (2025). Geographies of collaboration in hybrid learning spaces in the postdigital era: Towards sustainable futures for higher education learning. European Journal of Higher Education, 1–16. Pöysä-Tarhonen, J. (2026, in press). Emerging hybridity in higher education: From market-inspired educational offerings towards inclusive, fluid educational spaces. In L. Alonso de Andrade, E. Pekkola, & S. Lundborg (Eds.), Hybridity through transitions: Crisis and resilience in Nordic universities. Brill. Ryberg, T. (2025). Postdigital research: Resistance to closure. Postdigital Science and Education, 7, 308–315. Rüsselbæk Hansen, D., & Phelan, A. M. (2023). Comic absurdity and profane acts in education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(6), 901–912.