Student attitudes toward blended and online courses: a comparison of students in traditional classroom writing environments and students in blended writing environments

This study presents a mixed methods investigation of student attitudes toward blended and online courses. Specifically, the study compares two groups of university freshmen writing students. These groups respectively took writing classes in traditional classroom environments (without individual computers for each student in the classroom) and in blended classroom environments (with individual computers for each student in the classroom). The research questions were the following: RQ1: What are some of the general prevailing student attitudes toward blended classroom environments and online classroom environments? RQ2: If students take writing courses in a blended environment, will their attitudes toward blended and online education differ from the attitudes of students who only take traditional writing courses? RQ3: Will students who take blended writing courses have more favorable attitudes toward blended and online learning than students who do not take writing courses in blended environments? To answer the above research questions, a set of specific questions was presented as part of a survey to the students in both groups. Also, some qualitative data were generated in response to three open-ended questions about blended and online courses. The survey results were analyzed statistically and the qualitative data were subjected to corpus analysis and specific interpretation. Overall, the attitudes expressed by the students in this research suggest that there are some major differences between student groups in terms of their general attitudes to blended and online learning. The quantitative analysis showed statistically significant support for the idea that students with previous experience in blended classrooms have more favorable attitudes toward blended and online courses than students without previous experience in blended classrooms. The qualitative results showed a wide range of expressive and divergent opinions among all of the respondents, and the results also provided revealing answers to the research questions