Blended Learning Approach: Students’ Perception, Challenges and Achievement

Abstract

Background: Blended learning is a method of teaching that has gained prominence in the educational sphere lately. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 further publicized this teaching-learning approach, as schools across the world had to find alternatives to the face-to-face usual classroom instructions.   Objectives: This study examined students’ perceptions of the benefits and challenges of blended learning mode. Methods: Five research questions were raised to guide the study and a descriptive survey research design was employed. 264 undergraduates from a private university in Lagos state, Nigeria, participated in the study. The instrument used was Blended Learning Perception (BLP), it was adapted and Principal Component Analysis was used for its validation. The instrument explained a total variance of 56.52% and three factors were extracted. The reliability index of the Instrument was 0.87.  Descriptive Statistics was used to answer the research questions. Results: The result obtained showed that lecturers in the Faculty of Science utilized the blended approach the most, while many students had positive perception of the blended learning (2.92±0.53). The challenges faced by the students were; lack of training on how to use the Google classroom (64.8%), poor feedback from online assessments (68.9%), low internet speed and connectivity problems (84.8%). The benefits of blended learning as stated by some respondents were opportunity for individualized study and content retention (83.7%), learning in multiple ways (91.2%). Students attitude did not influence their academic achievement (r = 0.005). Conclusions: The findings showed that students had positive perception and attitude towards blended learning. Their attitude towards blended learning did not influence their academic achievement significantly.

Keywords: Blended learning, Gender, Students’ perception, Google classroom, Achievement