Amalgamated learning framework : a pedagogical solution and social incentive mechanism for college learners in evolutional blended learning

One of the demanding tasks of evolutional blended learning (BL) is how to improve learner participation from a social perspective. The difficulty of this task is due to a lack of online social incentives and to how challenged and resourceful learners can be identified and grouped easily for F2F and online collaboration. This paper proposes an amalgamated learning (AL) framework that has (i) a social incentive mechanism that uses Herzberg motivation-hygiene and cooperative competition theories to motivate learners; (ii) a pairing algorithm to adequately pair resourceful and challenged learners for F2F and online P2P collaboration based on specific difficulties; and (iii) a learning pedagogy to ensure content and human interactions and to enable recognition of learners' online actions to aid the incentive and the pairing mechanisms. The authors developed a prototype LMS for an experiment, and our results showed that influential and consequential motivation factors in the AL framework group influenced better learning and knowledge outcome compared to an evolutional BL group.