In the last three decades, information and communications technology (ICT) has evolved and a number of studies have reported its use in everyday life by seniors (Quan-Haase, Martin, & Schreurs, 2016) and young people (Mihailidis, 2014) alike. Higher education institutions have also benefitted from ICT (Siemens, Gašević, & Dawson, 2015), and distance education has been transformed accordingly. Several course delivery modes have emerged, with blended courses being one of the most popular (Hill, 2012; Irvine, 2009; Siemens et al., 2015; Skrypnyk et al., 2015). The literature offers numerous definitions of a blended course, which vary in the degree to which students have to attend class sessions in person or online, whether learning tasks are done in-class or online synchronously or asynchronously, and students’ degree of autonomy in choosing how or in which format they want to learn (Lakhal, Bateman, & Bédard, 2017). There is widespread agreement that “blended education goes beyond just combining traditional and online teaching and learning (Benson et al., 2011). It involves a total redesign of traditional courses to include the use of technology for online communication, activities and delivery” (Kyei-Blankson, Godwyll, & Nur-Awaleh, 2014, p.244). Three formats of blended courses have been identified in the literature (McGee & Reis, 2012). In the first, and the most commonly used by higher education institutions, students attend face-to-face sessions supplemented with online asynchronous teaching and learning activities. These courses are called Blended Courses. It should be noted that several modes of this format also exist (Lakhal & Meyer, 2019). In the second format, all teaching and learning activities occur online, some synchronously and others asynchronously. These courses are called Blended Online Courses (Power, 2008). In the third format, online students participate in class sessions synchronously with face-to-face students by means of ICT such as videoconferencing, web conferencing and virtual world. Asynchronous online activities are also planned for all students (Bower, Dalgarno, Kennedy, Lee, & Kenney, 2015; Irvine, Code, & Richards, 2013). These courses are commonly referred to as Blended Synchronous courses (Bower et al., 2015) although they are also given other names, such as HyFlex, Multi-access (Lakhal et al., 2017; Lakhal & Khechine, 2016; Lakhal, Khechine, & Pascot, 2014), Synchronous Blended or Synchronous Learning in Distributed Environments (Wang, Huang, & Quek, 2018), and Simultaneous Bimodality (Collin, Calonne, Peters, Lefrançois, & Saint-Jean, 2016). It is worth mentioning that in some of the studies reviewed, online students participated from two fixed sites, one face-to-face and the other remote, while in others, online students participated from multiple sites, in addition to the face-to-face site. These latter studies are limited in number. In this study, the focus is on Blended Synchronous Courses (BSC) in which online students are distributed across multiple sites.
BSC is gaining popularity in higher education institutions to achieve different ends. First, they improve remote students’ access to higher education (Hastie, Hung, Chen, & Kinshuk, 2010), especially in large countries such as Canada (Collin et al., 2016; Lakhal et al., 2017), Australia (Bower et al., 2015; Cunningham, 2014) and China (Szeto, 2014; Szeto & Cheng, 2016; Wang & Huang, 2018; Wang et al., 2018), where distances between students and higher education institutions can be considerable. It diminishes remote students’ sense of isolation and allows them to get to know other students much better than if they were enrolled in an asynchronous online course (Cunningham, 2014). Also, such courses meet the demands of students who desire flexibility in their course attendance, especially adult students (Abdelmalak & Parra, 2016; Wang et al., 2018). These students would not attend face-to-face courses, because of family and/or work responsibilities. Finally, they significantly lower educational costs for students and for higher education institutions. Indeed, these students can now benefit from contact with the instructor and the other students without needing to travel to attend face-to-face sessions. Moreover, these courses have financial benefits for higher education institutions since some students no longer have to meet in a physical location for each class session (Butz, Stupnisky, Peterson, & Majerus, 2014).
Given that BSC involve two kinds of students, remote and face-to-face, the aim of this study is to examine the features that foster all students’ academic and social integration in BSC. Academic and social integration have been considered by many studies and models as important determinants of student persistence and success in higher education programs and courses. In keeping with current research on blended courses that builds on models and theories developed for both face-to-face courses and online courses (Skrypnyk et al., 2015), we draw on Tinto’s model (Tinto, 1975, 1993) and those of Park (2007), Park and Choi (2009) and Rovai (2003) to better define the academic and social integration of students in BSC.
Literature review on blended synchronous courses
The empirical and theoretical research on blended learning is very abundant and has also been the subject of several literature reviews, systemic literature reviews and meta-analyses (e.g., Bernard, Borokhovski, Schmid, Tamim, & Abrami, 2014; Boelens, De Wever, & Voet, 2017; Drysdale, Graham, Spring, & Halverson, 2013; Halverson, Graham, Spring, Drysdale, & Henrie, 2014). However, little research has been done on BSC (Szeto & Cheng, 2016), despite its gain in popularity. Moreover, this research is somewhat sparse (Bower et al., 2015) and exploratory in nature. Despite this, we were able to group previous research into three categories: 1) BSC design (Bower et al., 2015; Bower, Kenney, Dalgarno, Lee, & Kennedy, 2014; Cunningham, 2014; Hastie et al., 2010; Wang & Huang, 2018); 2) Evaluation of BSC as a delivery mode (Abdelmalak & Parra, 2016; Butz et al., 2014; Collin et al., 2016; Kyei-Blankson et al., 2014; Lakhal et al., 2014; Szeto & Cheng, 2016; Wang et al., 2018); and 3) Videoconferencing in BSC (Khechine, Lakhal, & Pascot, 2014; Lakhal & Khechine, 2016, 2017; Lakhal, Khechine, & Pascot, 2013; Szeto, 2014). As the literature review shows, only seven studies have been performed to evaluate BSC. Additionally, given that this mode involves online and face-to-face students, it is not yet clear whether it ensures the academic and social integration of all students (Park, 2007; Park & Choi, 2009; Rovai, 2003; Tinto, 1975, 1993) and whether they are given equal opportunity for success in this delivery mode. To our knowledge, no previous researchers have guided their analysis or interpreted their results based on an academic and social integration framework. Since this course delivery mode seems to be increasingly used in many higher education institutions (Butz et al., 2014), and given the recent interest and scarce published research in BSC contexts, the results reported in this study should provide faculties and higher education administrators with additional information and guidance, based on empirical data, on the use of BSC if they wish to implement it in academic programs. Indeed, evidence-based recommendations are needed to assist them in ascertaining what works and what does not in BSC, and to guide them in designing and implementing BSC for their students (Bower et al., 2015).
Conceptual framework: academic and social integration
Tinto’s model has been applied in previous studies to explain students’ transition to higher education and their ability to succeed in their program. Students’ degree of adjustment to their academic and social environment is believed to significantly influence their decision to persist or drop out in higher education.
In his longitudinal, explanatory model, Tinto (1975, 1993) defined six successive sequences that underlie a student’s decision-making process for persisting in or dropping out from academic courses and programs: pre-entry attributes, objectives and initial commitments, experience with the university system, integration, objectives and emerging commitments and results. Students arrive at their university with pre-entry attributes. These attributes include family background, skills, abilities and prior schooling. Pre-entry attributes are related to students’ initial objectives and commitments, i.e., their professional goals and future career goals, their intention to obtain a degree, their preferred choice of higher education institution and their external commitments to others outside the higher education institution, such as family, friends, and employers. Pre-entry attributes and initial objectives and commitments have an influence on students’ academic and social integration. Once at the higher education institution, the student has an experience with the institution and interacts with formal and informal academic and social systems. These systems are characterized by activities involving instructors, non-teaching staff and peers, and include interactions with these individuals in formal settings (courses, assignments, content, teaching, learning and assessment activities, supervision, etc.) and informal settings (breaks between classes, out of class activities, before beginning the class, etc.). During this process, students’ initial objectives and commitments are adjusted according to what they have experienced in their new environment. Positive experiences with the academic and social systems strengthen students’ academic and social integration and lead them to persist in their courses and programs. However, negative experiences tend to undermine academic and social integration and lead students to drop out from courses and programs. Experiences in the academic system and the social system could influence each other. Both types of integration are important in the decision to persist or to drop out from higher education (Tinto, 1975, 1993).
According to Tinto (1975, 1993), academic integration is defined by students’ academic performance, level of intellectual development, and perception of having a positive experience in academic settings, while social integration is defined by involvement in extracurricular activities and the presence of positive relationships with peers. In this regard, in Tinto’s model (Tinto, 1975, 1993), instructors play an important role in students’ academic and social integration through the choices they make pertaining to course and program contents, supervision provided, teaching, learning and assessment strategies used, etc. Academic and social integration depend on the appropriateness of course and program contents, teaching and learning, and assessment strategies for students’ needs. The match between on one hand students’ needs, interests and preferences with regard to the various elements listed above, and on the other the higher education institution’s offer of these same elements (Tinto, 1993), is key to academic and social integration.
Tinto’s model was conceived for on-campus courses and programs. It does not take ICT or course delivery modes into account. The determinants of student academic and social integration in online courses and programs in higher education have been defined in some models, such as those of Park (2007), Park and Choi (2009) and Rovai (2003). These models supplemented Tinto’s model (Tinto, 1975, 1993) with some characteristics of adult students (Bean & Metzner, 1985) and of online courses and programs, which could influence students’ experience of academic and social systems, and thus, their academic and social integration. Adult students’ characteristics include financial aspects (capacities and problems), employment status, hours of employment, management support, scheduling conflicts, family responsibilities and issues, outside encouragement, opportunities for transfer, life crisis, and personal issues. Online course characteristics for their part include students’ skills and computer literacy, information literacy, computer-based interactions, technology/technical usability issues and instructional design of the courses. Tinto’s (1975, 1993) model and those of Park (2007), Park and Choi (2009) and Rovai (2003) have been validated by a number of studies, mainly quantitative. These models remain relevant in the context of this qualitative study, as the aim is to examine the features that foster academic and social integration in BSC. These features should stem from the determinants of academic and social integration listed in these models. Figure 1 depicts an integrated model from Park (2007), Park and Choi (2009), Rovai (2003) and Tinto (1975, 1993).
More specifically, in this study, we are interested in students’ experience with the university system (see Fig. 1) in regard with BSC while taking into account these courses’ characteristics. Students’ satisfaction with their experience in BSC strengthen their academic and social integration and lead them to persist in their courses and programs. The research questions were stated as follows:
- 1)
What are the instructional strategies (teaching, learning and assessment strategies) more suited in order to ensure students’ satisfaction (online and face-to-face) and therefore their academic and social integration in BSC?
- 2)
What are the skills and attitudes of instructors and students that increase (or decrease) satisfaction and facilitate (or hinder) the academic and social integration of all students (online and face-to-face) in BSC?