Investigation into the Motives and Perceptions of Implementing Blended Teaching in a Chinese Higher Education Context

Abstract

As a pedagogical approach in practice, blended teaching is generating unprecedented opportunities in higher education, but also poses new challenges. Whether teachers’ application of blended education can achieve steady and sustainable development is gaining increasing attention. This research examines whether teachers’ application of blended education shows sufficient motivation for sustainable development, by exploring the motives influencing blended teaching practices; examining the effectiveness of a blended course design that integrates automated essay scoring online; and describing the specific blended teaching situation in the given context. This can help develop knowledge of the motives affecting the implementation of a hybrid approach, improve teaching performance and quality in the given context, and add more value to the pedagogical practice by concentrating on its implementation. This dissertation includes a pilot study and three main experiments, as part of the project leading to a doctorate in Education. It employs quantitative and qualitative methods, and analyses the data collected from questionnaires, interviews, and triangular cross-verification of observations and informal conversations. The pilot study tested the feasibility of the intended qualitative thematic approach and provided parameters for designing the questions for the focus groups in the main study, through applying Creswell’s thematic analysis approach. Based on the pilot study results, the first experiment is a quantitative intervention in the given context. To apply the blended approach to college English writing as an intervention, a small-scale study involved 71 student participants divided into two groups, to compare an automated essay-scoring supported hybrid course design with traditional manual marking. This experiment examined the effectiveness of the blended approach and measured the attitudes of students with different scores. Statistical analysis reveals that students are not disadvantaged by the hybrid course (p<0.01). Both groups showed a significant improvement in performance (p<0.05). Students hold differentiated attitudes towards human scoring and automated essay scoring in a blended course design, correlating to their writing performances (p<0.05). The second experiment conducted two online focus groups with 14 teachers; it used thematic analysis and pattern identification techniques to identify the motives influencing the adoption and implementation of blended teaching, based on the participants’ narratives and descriptions. Between the two focus groups, the pandemic was found to affect the motive of technical skills, obliging all potentially suitable participants to practise online teaching for a whole semester. The two groups’ data were analysed separately before being combined to extract the results. Thus, the eight identified motives were inductively categorized into three dimensions (attitude, external environment, and subjective controllability). The analysis further explores the themes of conundrums and tentative countermeasures identified from the second focus group, observations, and informal online conversations. In the third experiment, a questionnaire survey, based on Neumeier’s parameters, was distributed to 166 teacher participants. The results presented the specific situation of implementing blended teaching, such as online platforms, time spent online, and mixed course design. The influencing motives were tested and measured by multiple linear regression methods in SPSS, with data collected from 187 valid questionnaires. Finally, a regression equation model identified the degrees and ranking order of influences, with the motive of self-efficacy being dominant (0.464), followed by social pressure (0.216), and perceived utility (0.183). Based on the research findings, this research proposes suggestions regarding blended teaching practices, such as resource construction and teachers’ professional development.