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Introduction
In this digital age, businesses must keep pace with and capitalize on the potential benefits of technological advances for learning and development (L&D). The only way for L&D professionals to support employee growth and improvement is through providing easily accessible learning that is available for employees to access on demand and that involves hands-on application and collaboration; blended learning is a great way to maximize these options (Andreatta, 2017). Blended learning, a term that started gaining interest in the early 2000s, is defined as a combination of traditional face-to-face learning and online or computer-mediated learning (Graham, 2006, p. 65), and has emerged as one approach to maintaining elements of more traditional L&D approaches whilst also harnessing the potential benefits of technology for learning. These benefits include extending the reach of training (increased access and flexibility), increasing learning effectiveness, optimizing developmental cost and time and optimizing business results (Bernard et al., 2014; Graham, 2006; Rossett and Frazee, 2006; Singh, 2003; Singh and Reed, 2001).
Research into blended learning programs in recent years has focused on the effectiveness of these programs especially regarding the experience of the learner (Hsu and Hsieh, 2011; Kintu et al., 2017; Rangel et al., 2015). One commonly used criterion for evaluating the effectiveness of a learning experience in both educational and workplace contexts is learner engagement (Berg and Chyung, 2008; Slotte and Herbert, 2008; Stein and Graham, 2014; Tay, 2016), which occurs in the forms of behavioral, cognitive and emotional engagement (Fredricks et al., 2004). Learner engagement is said to happen through learner interaction: interaction with learning content as well as interpersonal interaction with instructors and other learners (Chametzky, 2014; Moore, 1989). Interpersonal interaction may occur in the form of face-to-face or online interactions, or a combination of both (Wegmann and Thompson, 2014), and has been found to increase interaction with learning content (McDonald, 2013). In order to design and implement effective blended learning programs for the workplace, it is therefore necessary to understand how human interaction facilitates behavioral, cognitive and emotional learner engagement in blended workplace learning (BWL). Halverson et al. (2014) call for more focused research on learner engagement and the connection between human interaction and other aspects of engagement in blended learning. The...