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ABSTRACT
Recently, blended learning has become popular in higher education. In this study, we aim to investigate influential factors that could impact student learning in this young and relatively immature environment. Factors from three perspectives - students themselves, instructors, and institutional support - were examined. Specifically, these factors are students' computer self-efficacy, instructor characteristics, and facilitating conditions. A research model was developed to systematically assess their impacts on students' perceived accomplishment, perceived enjoyment, and satisfaction toward the blended class. We also explored the gender differences by testing the research model on the two genders respectively. Interestingly, we found that for female students all three factors had significant impacts on their perceived accomplishment and perceived enjoyment, which in turn significantly impacted their learning satisfaction; however, for male students, no significant impact was found from computer self-efficacy to either perceived accomplishment or perceived enjoyment (the other two factors were significant).
Keywords: Blended learning, User satisfaction, Enjoyment, Student attitudes
1.INTRODUCTION
Creation and adoption of new instructional approaches that can better assist college students' learning needs and help increase their engagement has been a major focus in higher education over the years. With the increased popularity and advancements in information technology (IT), technologysupported learning has gained much attention in contemporary higher education. Over the years, higher education has gone through three generations of evolution (So and Brush, 2008). The first generation is the traditional, face-to-face instruction in which students and their instructors meet physically in a designated classroom (So and Brush, 2008). During the class time, instructors disseminate knowledge to students through lecturing or other instructional approaches. The second generation is e-learning (also called distance learning) which is made possible because of the increased maturity and accessibility of computer and network technologies (Kulkarni et al., 2013; So and Brush, 2008; Sun et al., 2008). Researchers have found that learners perceive e-learning as effective since it can provide self-paced and multimedia instruction (Liaw, Huang, and Chen, 2007). However, concerns about elearning also have been identified in previous research, such as the time and labor cost to set up, maintain, and use the elearning environment (Sun et al., 2008). In addition, such environment may give students a feeling of separation from both their instructors and classmates, and students without high...