Blended Learning Adoption and Implementation in Higher Education: A Theoretical and Systematic Review

Bokolo Anthony,Danakorn Nincarean A L Eh Phon,Awanis Romli,Adzhar Kamaludin,Gan Leong Ming,Anis Farihan Mat Raffei,Aziman Abdullah

doi:10.1007/s10758-020-09477-z

Bokolo Anthony, Danakorn Nincarean A L Eh Phon + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10758-020-09477-z

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Abstract

Technological innovations such as blended learning (BL) are rapidly changing teaching and learning in higher education, where BL integrates face to face teaching with web based learning. Thus, as polices related to BL increases, it is required to explore the theoretical foundation of BL studies and how BL were adopted and implemented in relation to students, lecturers and administration. However, only fewer studies have focused on exploring the constructs and factors related to BL adoption by considering the students, lecturers and administration concurrently. Likewise, prior research neglects to explore what practices are involved for BL implementation. Accordingly, this study systematically reviews, synthesizes, and provides meta-analysis of 94 BL research articles published from 2004 to 2020 to present the theoretical foundation of BL adoption and implementation in higher education. The main findings of this study present the constructs and factors that influence students, lecturers and administration towards adopting BL in higher education. Moreover, findings suggest that the BL practices to be implemented comprises of face-to-face, activities, information, resources, assessment, and feedback for students and technology, pedagogy, content, and knowledge for lecturers. Besides, the review reveals that the ad hoc, technology acceptance model, information system success model, the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology, and lastly diffusion of innovations theories are the mostly employed theories employed by prior studies to explore BL adoption. Findings from this study has implications for student, lecturers and administrators by providing insights into the theoretical foundation of BL adoption and implementation in higher education.

Highlights

Blended learning (BL) has increasingly been utilized in higher education as it has the advantages of both traditional and online teaching approaches (Poon 2014)
Only fewer studies explored BL implementation process as well explored administrators’ who initiate policies related to BL adoption in higher education. To fill this gap in knowledge, this current study aims to systematically reviews and synthesizes prior studies that explored BL adoption and implementation related to students, lecturers and administration based on the following six research questions: RQ1 What are the research methods, countries, contexts, and publication year of selected BL studies? RQ2 Which BL studies proposed model related to BL adoption in higher education? RQ3 Based on RQ2 what are the theories, location, and context of the selected BL studies? RQ4 Based on RQ3 what are the constructs of the identified theories employed to explore BL adoption in higher education? RQ5 What are the constructs and factors that influence students, lecturers and administration towards adopting BL? RQ6 What are the practices involved for BL implementation in higher education?
Based on the selected 94 studies published in regard to BL adoption and implementation from 2004 to 2020, this review reports the findings of this systematic review in relation to the specified six research questions

Summary

Introduction

Blended learning (BL) has increasingly been utilized in higher education as it has the advantages of both traditional and online teaching approaches (Poon 2014). BL employs a combination of online-mediated and face-to-face (F2F) instruction to help lecturers attain pedagogical goals in training students to produce an algorithmic and constructive rational skill, aids to enhance teaching qualities, and achieve social order (Subramaniam and Muniandy 2019). Owston et al (2019) recommended that a successful BL delivery comprises of 80% high quality online learning integrated with 20% classroom teaching that is linked to online content. BL is the combination of different didactic approaches (cooperative learning, discovery learning expository, presentations, etc.) and delivery methods (personal communication, broadcasting, publishing, etc.) (Graham 2013; Klentien and Wannasawade 2016)

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