Vol 3 No 2 (2025)

• Blended Education in Practice: Understanding the Gap between Instructional Design Knowledge and Digital Learning Integration

  Hanneke Theelen

  Blended education is increasingly implemented in higher education, yet its sustainable adoption remains a challenge, with persistent gaps between awareness, pedagogical integration, and institutional support. This study examines how lecturers engage with blended education design principles, apply them in instructional design, and utilize online learning environments. By exploring these aspects, this study contributes to our understanding of educational change and the factors influencing its implementation across different experience levels in higher education. Findings reveal that 10-25% of lecturers are unfamiliar with key blended education principles, but a more critical issue is the gap between knowledge and practical application. Approximately two-thirds of lecturers lack familiarity with advanced LMS and Microsoft Teams© functionalities, limiting their pedagogical impact. While Microsoft Teams© is more widely used, its advanced features remain underutilized due to limited awareness and training. Additionally, early-career lecturers show greater familiarity with collaborative and formative strategies compared to their more experienced counterparts, emphasizing the role of generational differences in pedagogical change. These findings highlight the complexity of educational change in an international higher education context, where faculty development, institutional policies, and intergenerational knowledge exchange play crucial roles. The study underscores the need for sustained professional development programs that move beyond technical training to foster pedagogical transformation. Without these efforts, blended education risks remaining an administrative rather than a pedagogical shift, limiting its potential to create student-centered, flexible, and innovative learning environments globally.

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• Is the Metaverse for Education a Blessing or a Curse?

  Siham Abukhalaf

  The Metaverse, a virtual world connecting imaginative ideas to real-life experiences through immersive technologies, has gained increasing attention, particularly following the global shift to virtual platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the Metaverse holds promise for transforming education by enhancing realism, motivation, active learning, collaboration, and personalized experiences, its integration into educational settings remains in the early stages, with limited empirical research available. This study aims to explore stakeholders’ perceptions of the Metaverse’s potential learning opportunities, anticipated challenges, and readiness for adoption. Grounded in the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) framework, this research seeks to fill gaps in the current literature by offering empirical insights into the benefits, drawbacks, and preparedness related to Metaverse integration in education.

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• Microcredentials As effective Student Motivators to Enhance Academic Engagement and Progress of High School Students: A Scoping Review

  Patrick Guggisberg, Marika Guggisberg

  This scoping review discusses findings in relation to the use of technology in the form of microcredentials for high school students. It found that students may benefit from rewards for their efforts with microcredentials as an extrinsic motivational factor that could positively enhance motivation to learn and engage in academic activities. Positive feedback using the award of microcredentials for personal individual achievement tend to lead to support student engagement and motivation and increase self-efficacy, which may result in increased motivation to learn and engage in learning activities. In this regard, evidence suggests that teachers play an important role in motivating students and support them in experiencing academic progress. However, some scholars indicated that the provision of microcredentials as extrinsic rewards may have a negative effect on students’ motivation to learn and be counterproductive for their intrinsic motivation. While the implementation of microcredentials is a relatively novel way in the secondary education context, some limited studies indicated that awarding them provides excellent opportunities to celebrate learning progress and create personalized educational experiences in the traditional classroom with the potential to positively influence self-efficacy and motivation to learn. In this regard, it was observed that studies frequently combined different technologies in the form of gamification and microcredentialing, an issue which required further elaboration by this scoping review along with the need for further research.

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