Abstract:

Blended learning integrates digital media, technology and traditional in-person teacher-led classroom activities. This hybrid learning technique has become a new trend in education. The purpose of this research is to highlight the importance of these new educational techniques and to deepen the knowledge of their use and their impact in the context of information and communication technologies (ICTs). To do so, a detailed analysis is carried out on the social network Twitter. This social network is the most used to openly discuss concepts, providing information on the interactions between users and links to the use of specific hashtags. That is why Twitter is being used in academic studies and as a methodology as such, and in this research the connection between the use of Twitter and blended learning is based on their common roots on the use of technology. In order to obtain Twitter data, as part of the research process, we used the personal account of one of the researchers of this paper. We requested a Twitter Developer Account. To do so, it was required to add a telephone number to the existing Twitter account, and to fill in a questionnaire explaining the purpose of the research using Twitters’ data. After 14 days we were approved. Using raw data from the Twitter API can be difficult at first but Twitter has recently added new options that make the process easier. This present research analyses 29,472 tweets posted form July 15, 2021 to July 15, 2022, using the hashtag #blendedlearning. No restriction on language was applied, so as long as a tweet included the aforementioned hashtag it would be part of the sample of study. New insight is provided on the specific topic and its use by academic institutions, educators and students. More than 80 tweets were posted daily using this hashtag. They were posted by 11,483 contributors, which makes an average of 142 tweets per contributor. It can be confirmed that blended learning was an active issue of debate on Twitter during the period analyzed. The great majority of these tweets, 60% of them, are in fact retweets. This could be read as a low commitment on this topic, but a deeper analysis leads us to understand that there was good content created, so it attracted Twitter users interested in blended learning educational issues. They easily retweeted and expanded the reach of this content in Twitter. With regards to the age of the Twitter accounts, 60% of them had existed for six years or more. This shows that the topic is being discussed by accounts that have been in used for a long time, so they are reliable, not related to new accounts just created to expand a specific issue. Top sources of use of these tweets were in the following order: Twitter for iPhone, Twitter web app, Twitter for Android, Hootsuite, Tweet Deck, IFTT, Twitter for iPad and Buffer. Together with the hashtag analyzed, six more hashtags were used in the following order: #edtech, #edchat, #education, #edutwitter, #onlinelearning, and #elearning. This confirms that Twitter users relate blended learning to technology, online learning and e-learning. The importance of learning and education has reached all areas of society, not only the purely academic ones. Clearly education, and specifically blended learning, is a topic of debate and interest to Twitter users.

Keywords:

Blended learning, Education trends, ICTs, Twitter.