The effect of blended massive open online courses on students’ perceptions of their engagement and learning outcomes.

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have arisen in recent years and have sparked significant discourse regarding education. MOOCs have become firmly established in the educational landscape and have undergone various adaptations, including the emergence of blended MOOCs integrating campus-based courses with MOOCs, resulting in a more profound learning experience. Blended MOOCs enable the use of various blended pedagogies, which can be used to offset the numerous challenges facing higher education in the global south, such as 1) limited access, 2) inadequacies and obsolescence infrastructure, 3) limited resources, 4) students’ enrolment that is far beyond what they were designed to accommodate, 5) overcrowding in lecture halls, 6) shortage of lecturers, especially research-active and experienced senior academics, 7) poor quality of education to meet the needs of today’s workforce and 8) mismatch between the skills of graduates. This study examines how blended MOOCs relate to students' learning and perceived academic performance. It analyses students' acceptance and use, engagement, and factors influencing their satisfaction and perceived academic performance. This analysis incorporates the revised Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, including learning presence and the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT 2) models. An empirical study was conducted with 2875 students from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, selected via two-stage cluster sampling to accomplish this objective. The respondents were levels 100, 200, 300 and 800 students who were instructed to enrol into MOOCs as open educational resources (OERs) to supplement their campus-based for a semester. Upon the conclusion of the semester, the students were requested to complete a questionnaire. Subsequently, the collected data underwent analysis utilising SmartPLS v4 and SPSS v28 software. In general, the model demonstrates a strong alignment with the gathered data and possesses an adequate level of efficacy in elucidating the phenomenon of students’ usage acceptance (UTAUT 2) of blended MOOCs and its impacts on engagement (CoI), satisfaction and academic performance. The findings have several implications for research and EdTech integration practices among sub-Saharan nations, which were also discussed. Consequently, this study offers significant contributions to the theory and practice of active learning in a blended MOOC environment.