Blended Learning (BL) as a pedagogical approach has increased in significance during the COVID-19 pandemic, with blended and online learning environments becoming the new digital norm for higher educational institutions around the globe. While BL has been discussed in the literature for thirty years, a common approach has been to categorise learner cohorts to support educators in better understanding students’ relationships with learning technologies. This approach, largely unsupported by empirical evidence, has failed to adequately address the challenges of integrating learning technologies to fit with non-traditional students’ preferences, their BL self-efficacy and the associated pedagogical implications. Focusing on student preference, our study presents findings from a pre-COVID survey of undergraduate students across four campuses of an Australian regional university where students shared their learning technology preferences and the self-regulated learning that influenced their academic self-efficacy in a BL context. Findings show students want consistency, relevance, and effectiveness with the use of BL tools, with a preference for lecture recordings and video resources to support their learning, while email and Facebook Messenger were preferred for communicating with peers and academic staff. Our study suggests a quality BL environment facilitates self-regulated learning using fit-for-purpose technological applications. Academic self-efficacy for BL can increase when students perceive the educational technologies used by their institution are sufficient for their learning needs.
The key to this provocation is the spectrogram with its beautiful bands of colours. This image represents 44 days of recorded acoustic data which has been subject to falsecolour imagery in the same way that satellite images are represented. The soundscape was captured to help ecologists understand the migration patterns of the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. The spectrograms identify three dominant features of the ocean soundscape in the area of this sample (15 kilometres off the coast of Georgia in the centre of the whales' calving grounds): mechanical noise from passing ships; the night chorus of the black-drum fish (Pogonias cromis); and a mysterious third element, possibly caused by the cables that tether the hydrophone to the ocean floor strumming under the influence of strong tidal currents.
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