Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 136, July 2019, Pages 1-12
Computers & Education

Student enrollment, motivation and learning performance in a blended learning environment: The mediating effects of social, teaching, and cognitive presence

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.02.021Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Little is known about how different learning attributes influence learning effectiveness in blended earning context.

  • Data samples from 207 university students were collected.

  • Results show that student enrollment is positively related to cognitive presence, social presence and learning outcome.

  • Teaching presence has positive influence on cognitive presence and social presence in the blended learning environment.

  • Learning motivation positively influences student enrollment.

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of student enrolment and learning motivation on learning performance in a blended learning setting at the university level with social, teaching, and learning presence as mediating factors. Data samples were collected from 96 students taking blended learning course and 111 students taking a traditional course. The comparison between these two groups does not show a significant difference in the three presences and learning performance. Structural equation modelling results revealed that student enrolment has a positive impact on social presence and cognitive presence. Enrolment also positively influences learning performance through the above two presences. Learning motivation positively influence social presence only. Learning motivation also plays a vital role in enhancing the enrolment but does not directly influence learning performance in a blended learning setting. Teaching presence was found to have direct positive impacts on the cognitive presence and social presence, and indirect positive impacts on learning performance. These findings highlight the importance of student enrolment and course design from the teaching perspective in a blended learning setting.

Introduction

Blended Learning (BL) combines online learning and offline face-to-face learning and facilitates free and open dialogue in the Community of Inquiry (COI). COI involves teaching, social and cognitive presence, offering a convenient instrument to assess the quality of online teaching (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000). In the online learning environment, students have more flexibility in deciding when, how and with what content and activities they engage in (Milligan & Littlejohn, 2014). Student enrolment represents students' willingness to enrol in a particular course. For a student to enrol in a course, many motivating factors would take place. Students’ willingness to enrol in a BL course represents the initial motivation to engage in the course, and also their commitment to achieving learning goals. There have been some studies that investigated the learning effectiveness of students in the BL setting by adopting the COI framework, but there still exists the need for new studies to be carried out with variables, such as the impacts of student enrolment on learning outcomes and the mediating role of the social, teaching, and cognitive presences. This research sets out to examine the impact of student enrolment and learning motivation on student learning effectiveness in the BL setting.

The subsequent sections of this paper first review the related literature that lays the theoretical foundation. Then the research hypotheses and data collection method are presented. After that, the results and findings are reported, and conclusions are drawn.

Section snippets

Blended learning

With the broad adoption of Information and Communication Technology(ICT) to support the learning and teaching study in higher education, the blended learning approach is well developed. Blended learning is a fundamental redesign that transforms the structure of, and ways to, teaching and learning. Blended learning is defined as an instruction which takes place in a traditional classroom setting augmented by computer-based or online activities that can replace classroom seat time (Garrison &

Hypotheses development

In recent years, the concept of learning communities has been proposed to depict the effectiveness of classroom learning environment. Based on this concept, the framework of the Community of Inquiry (COI) developed by Garrison et al. (2000) has been widely used to examine and improve the learning effectiveness in asynchronous learning courses. Each of the three COI presences represents a different dimension of a student learning experience. Therefore, the three presences are adopted as core

Measurement instrument

The four sets of hypotheses were tested using a quantitative survey. We designed a list of questions associated with the factors in our model (see Appendix 1). The first part consists of the items of student enrolment (EN), learning motivation (LM), social presence (SP), teaching presence (TP), cognitive presence (CP), and learning performance (PERF). The second part consists of the personal particulars of respondents, such as gender, discipline, and year of study.

The survey was developed by

Enrolment, cognitive presence, social presence, and learning performance

Enrolment is found to have a direct effect on the social and cognitive presence in this study, and an indirect effect on student learning performance. In the blended learning setting, the initial willingness of students to enrol in the course drives them to interact and communicate differently with other students. The enrolment of students indicates the initial motivation and commitment of students. Students are self-committed to participate in learning and thinking, and they are self-initiated

Conclusions

This paper examined the role of student enrolment in the BL teaching environment. The student enrolment is found to have positive effects on cognitive and social presence, and indirect positive impacts on student learning outcomes. The results reveal that learning motivation enhances student enrolment and social presence. Teaching presence plays a vital role in facilitating student cognitive thinking and social interactions among peers. The findings in this study provide important implications

Limitations

Though the sample size was not significant due to the restricted enrolment number for the BL classes, which was only offered to a selected group of students of the same background for the better control of the experiment. We expect to extend the study to more selected BL classes further. This study emphasises the roles of enrolment and learning motivation in BL setting. Although we performed structural equation modelling for NBL data group, the findings are not included in order to make the

Contribution

Findings in this study reveal the impacts of student enrolment and learning motivation on learning performance in the blended learning environment. The usage of computer and technology in BL setting is indispensable. The contributions of using computer and technology in BL include connecting student for interactivity and collaboration (Bai et al., 2016) which is the key to the social presence. Furthermore, in the BL setting, course designers can utilise the enrolment information to adjust the

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