Abstract:

Active blended learning (ABL) has been identified in recent years as a pedagogy that shows promise in increasing student engagement and learning in higher education (Maxwell and Armellini 2018; Vaughan 2014). Unlike the stricter interpretations of Flipped Learning (FL), ABL encourages the judicious use of face-to-face (F2F) teaching to supplement instructional material such as lectures and readings that are ‘flipped’ onto online learning platforms such as mycourses or Moodle. ABL aims to blend different learning experiences to provide a more personalised learning environment that leans heavily on the creative use of digital tools and solutions to help students thrive. In a story familiar to educational institutions the world over, national lockdowns forced this University/Business school into an abrupt shift to online learning over the space of a week, with students and staff meeting in Zoom classrooms rather than physical classrooms for half of the Spring term and all of the Summer terms. In the Fall term, most professors and students returned to in-class sessions on the physical UG campus in East London. Many students, however, chose to remain at home and take advantage of the innovative “Limitless Learning” program that uses digital tools and technology to enable home students to join ‘hybrid’ classrooms and interact with their onsite professors and classmates in real time. This means that in the space of a few months, professors experimented with the school’s preferred ABL pedagogy in physical classrooms, in online classrooms and in the hybrid “Limitless Learning” classrooms mentioned previously. This paper aims to explore how ABL pedagogies work in these three different classroom settings. It does so by looking closely at the experiences of two faculty members and their approximately 300 students across a range of UG courses at the London campus of Hult International Business School. It follows their journey across these three different types of classroom, exploring their attempts to adapt their teaching methods, learning activities, digital tools and assessments to exploit the strengths and offset the weaknesses of each type of classroom arrangement. Qualitative and quantitative data will be presented from online surveys, focus groups, self-reflections, course evaluations and course outputs to assess the impact and effectiveness of the ABL techniques trialled in class. The results and discussion explore how the teaching strategies, digital tools and online platforms that lie at the heart of ABL can be adapted to these three different classrooms settings, and investigate how well they enabled in-class and off-site learning activities to function as genuine sites of collaborative learning across settings. The findings from this research will provide guidance for educators who wish to use ABL techniques in online and hybrid classrooms as well as in the more traditional on-site classroom. This guidance will prove useful in the post-pandemic era, as institutions, educators and students alike seek to consolidate and adapt those elements of online learning that worked for them during the pandemic. Exploring what works and why will help in the redesign of programs and courses and help ensure a smoother transition for all stakeholders.

Keywords:

Active blended learning, pandemic, hybrid classrooms, online classrooms, digital tools, assessment, student engagement, collaborative learning, higher education.