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Affordances, approaches, and challenges for blended, technology-enhanced learning: present and future development

This quote has been variously attributed to a Nobel prize winner in chemistry, a film producer, a Baseball manager, an American author, and a French apothecary. Given this shared sentiment across so many different fields, we might be forgiven for wondering how we can evaluate current developments in technology-enhanced and collaborative learning settings, let alone predict future development in such a fast evolving sector, particularly when these are often associated with rapidly changing developments in technology. This special issue will critique the debate in the area, seek to advance the research field, and, most importantly, attempt to demonstrate whether (and under what conditions) particular uses of collaborative and learning technologies may be more effective than established approaches to learning, teaching, and assessment. One main thread in this special issue is that successes achieved in using technology-enhanced learning often focus on the extent to which student feedback is necessary for improving practice and influencing the use of e-learning instruction. The use of student feedback is closely related to its previously little-studied effect on student intentions and attitudes, and several papers in this special issue show in different ways that the interplay between feedback, motivation, individual differences, instructional change, and technology-enhanced learning is often complex and nuanced. Learning, evaluation, pedagogical change, and technology use are part of a complex interplay between technology, individual differences, pedagogy, student attitudes, and desired outcomes. In the first article, “Modelling Blended Solutions for Higher Education: Teaching, Learning, and Assessment in the Network and Mobile Technology Era”, Bocconi and Trentin focus on an ontology of blended learning where different facets of blended settings are examined to see how they may enhance learning by exploiting the varied opportunities these offer. Student evaluations of teaching are an established feature of many educational institutions and appear across the educational landscape more widely, but the degree of engagement of students with this process would appear to be quite nuanced and rest on both altruistic and pragmatic considerations that may not always be taken sufficiently into account when the evaluations are interpreted. Student response rates can be quite low for the evaluation of teaching and associated learning resources, and there are a number of issues that might influence students to engage more or less fully. This article argues that the process of instructional design may need to be much more fully integrated with the deployment of assessment and monitoring instruments if transparent and meaningful student engagement data are to be captured. The second and third articles also explore student evaluation and feedback but focus more on the importance of the most appropriate use of evaluation to bring about effective