New legislation sparked a partnership with local elementary schools highlighting STEM practices in a lab setting, focusing on student and teacher concerns, inquiry lessons, and best practices for teaching. The Active-Flex platform blended the active learning components into asynchronous online courses, giving students an equivalent experience despite their attendance mode.

Many traditional brick-and-mortar universities were seeking different opportunities to provide diverse delivery options for students to attend classes. Enter HyFlex. Beatty (2010) defines HyFlex courses as those that "enable a flexible participation policy for students whereby students may choose to attend face-to-face synchronous class sessions or complete course learning activities online without physically attending class." After our 2020 HyFlex pilot, we experimented with ways to address equity and access while actively engaging students. As this continued to expand among the colleges, we developed Active-Flex, which built an active learning component to the asynchronous online course and gave students an equivalent experience regardless of their attendance mode.

In this presentation, we will outline how to collaborate with local schools and design courses and activities that engage students in a variety of platforms, and appeal to different learners. We will detail the new legislation that led to the process of fostering a partnership with a local elementary school. We will explain how a STEM lab was created, the equipment necessary, and explore building strategies, and teaching styles that worked best in this environment. Then we will focus on the strategic goals for the STEM lab and the future expansion of the elementary school collaboration. Strategies to actively engage students will be discussed along with teaching methods.

The focus of the presentation will be on:
1. Designing curriculum and assessments for the ActiveFlex platform.
2. Technological infrastructure and tools that support ActiveFlex learning.
3. Strategies for engaging students across different participation modes.
4. Measuring the effectiveness of the STEM lab and partnership.
5. Using OERs in the STEM field

With STEM and science lessons, tips will be shared for overcoming student and teacher concerns, inquiry lessons, and best practices for teaching these subjects. In the presentation, we will share our 6 best tips to engage in an ActiveFlex environment.
Additionally, we will explain how courses were converted to complement the Active-Flex platform and reach more students. We will finish with an overview of the process of establishing partnerships, the roles of each partner, and the impact on student learning and engagement.