Abstract:
Blended learning has grown in importance across the university sector with increased demands for flexible and efficient delivery of content to increasingly time constrained learners. Enabled through technological innovation, asynchronous (out-of-class) learning offers a way to fulfil these demands. Yet few robust, evidence based frameworks exist to offer guidance to university educators. This article provides one such framework by testing an application of a blended (online/in-class) learning community, and its effect on student’s learning performance (final grades). We show that our low-investment blended learning approach is not only an efficient way to leverage existing technology, but more importantly leads to improved academic achievement and higher engagement for students. In particular, our findings highlight a dual pathway to academic achievement in blended learning; one that is based on increased active participation, and the other based on the mediating role of student engagement. We discuss implications for university educators.