Abstract:

In the past decade educational environment has been enriched by rapid technological development. Learning and teaching take place in various and diverse settings. The current study attempts to investigate how online activities integrate with classroom tasks to foster students’ academic progress.

This is a study in progress. The research participants are university students at a university in West Europe. Empirical data includes video recordings of classroom sessions, my research notes on observations of the students’ online academic activities, and semi-structured interviews with the students and the professors. Discourse analysis is conducted to code the data. Three categories of theories are employed to form the theoretical framework to help me to interpret the data, which are: the social learning theories, the social presence theories, and the virtual learning theories.

My initial data analysis shows that the online academic activities served as resources for the students to obtain new and alternative ideas; whereas, the classroom interactions helped the students to build up their professional identities as members in the fields of their academic studies. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potentials of the development of a multi-model educational environment.