COVID-19 seems like a long time ago now. As teachers, we won’t easily forget the challenge of shifting to online learning and how we missed interacting with students in the classroom. But we all learned that, to some extent, online learning had advantages. An ongoing question is how we can retain those advantages back in the classroom?
International and multilingual students who are new to higher education often struggle to meet the English-language requirements of their disciplines and to develop academic study skills. For those students, blended learning can play an important role. Blended learning combines the strengths of online and face-to-face classes, utilising a Virtual Learning Environment such as Moodle or Blackboard. By providing students with the time and space they need to reflect and formulate their own thoughts, in-class and out-of-class engagement can be enhanced, leading to improved learning and grades. Research has also shown that blended learning can enhance digital skills and self-regulation, thereby indirectly impacting learning in other courses.
However, there are still questions about what kind of technical and pedagogical support students need to make the most of blended learning and how we can best help students organise their learning on blended courses.
A new tool called H5P can be used to create more than 50 interactive activities that can be integrated with Blackboard, Moodle, or personal websites. These include interactive videos that can be used to create engaging, fun activities covering key skills such as paraphrasing sources and integrating them in writing. Research has found that the technical requirements for creating and using these are relatively low, with benefits for retention and engagement. Research on instructional videos has also found that students benefit from clear, accessible guidance on completing specific tasks.
To determine if H5P videos could play a useful role in blended learning, my research partner and I decided to design and create a series of interactive videos and provide them to students in class for social learning. We also analysed Virtual Environment analytics data and interviewed 12 students about their experiences and engagement with blended learning using H5P videos.
My findings revealed that students who accessed the videos more frequently showed improvements in in-class tests compared with those who did not regularly access them. Learners were also more likely to engage with other parts of their course, both within and outside the classroom. This may relate to the videos’ content, which explicitly covered academic skills such as finding and integrating sources for academic writing.
These findings suggest that adaptive and interactive H5P videos could play an important role in the future of blended learning. Since H5P is a free, open-source, and intuitive piece of software, there are few restrictions to using it to facilitate flexible and engaging learning, whether online or face-to-face. By combining this tool with simple, personal videos, we can enhance learning experiences with relatively little effort while avoiding the need to repeat ourselves in class.
Daniel Pigou is a doctoral researcher in the SIoE supervised by Dr Lisa McGrath and Dr Emma Rempe-Gillen. His research explores blended learning, using interactive videos and activities to promote student engagement in academic writing.
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