Designing a scaffolding peer learning tool for the online component of blended learning / Rasheed Abubakar Rasheed

Rasheed Abubakar , Rasheed (2022) Designing a scaffolding peer learning tool for the online component of blended learning / Rasheed Abubakar Rasheed. PhD thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

Blended learning involves the combination of face-to-face with online component instructions and is considered the most effective and most popular mode of instruction adopted by today’s educational institutions due to its perceived effectiveness in providing flexible, timely and continuous learning. However, the inclusion of technology into instruction thereby creating the online component has brought some level of unease to students, teachers and educational institutions. Several studies have reported the various problems that students, teachers and educational institutions face with the online component of blended learning. The leading challenge associated with the online component of blended learning is students’ inability to proper self-regulate their learning activities due to the numerous types of challenges associated with online studying. Research on scaffolding students’ self-regulation in the online component of blended learning has not proposed a unified scaffolding solution to enable students to overcome these various challenges as well as engaging them in proper self-regulation in their online components. Several studies have proclaimed peer learning as a learning strategy that is capable of alleviating online component challenges thereby enabling students to fully realize the benefits of blended learning instruction. As such, a deductive methodological approach was adopted which involves investigating and carefully understanding the practices and key elements of peer learning from various research domains in order to understand how to engage students to a peer-learning self-regulation strategy for scaffolding their online component of blended learning. The first stage involves designing online peer learning groups based on learning potential and affinity models, leveraging the design of learning system features to instigate group dynamic elements for facilitating and motivating small group peer learning, and fostering pro-social behaviors by offering indirect incentives for combating the inherent problems of reluctance to students’ peer-learning participation. Then, a learning system prototype is implemented to ascertain the identified peer learning key features and elements to enable the applicability of the peer learning scaffolding approach in real-life scenarios. An experiment involving 120 undergraduate university students using the widely adopted experimental and control group evaluation method shows significant improvement in students’ learning achievements by using the proposed peer learning scaffolding approach. The main contribution of this research is a peer learning framework for educational institutions to adopt as a tool in order to revise their blended learning instruction for scaffolding their student’s online component studying.

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