Chapter 10: Student Engagement in Synchronous Blended Learning

While online education at the college level has been on the rise for the last decade (Kucuk & Richardson, 2019), the COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt shift from traditional in-person learning to online or hybrid learning across most of the world; a situation for which many instructors and students were underprepared. During this shift, many instructors were required to teach classes in-person and online simultaneously, to adapt to changes in students’ attendance when there had been COVID-19 exposure (Martin, Xie, et al., 2022). This particular type of blended learning occurs when students in the face-to-face classroom meet simultaneously with remote students connecting through video conferencing; a model we term synchronous blended learning (SBL). In SBL, the instructor holds the in-person class as dominant, but also provides students with online participation opportunities as necessary (Raes, Detienne, et al., 2020). Following the recent pandemic surge, higher education has seen significant increases in SBL. This trend is expected to continue after the COVID-19 pandemic due to a range of potential benefits, such as its flexibility in place to accommodate a diverse student population with busy schedules, part-time jobs, or other obligations with constraints of physical presence; accountability through real-time engagement, reducing potential procrastination; and its interactive learning environment format providing instant clarification and feedback. As college-level instructors in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology, we have firsthand experience with the benefits and challenges of providing SBL for our students. These challenges have been exacerbated by the reality that individual students may switch their participation mode at very short notice.