Basis psychological needs of students in blended learning

Traditional classroom setting has transitioned from a solely face-to-face, teacher-oriented instructional approach to an integrated, mixed-mode classroom learning dynamic. With this change of educational context, it is imperative to know: are students’ basic psychological needs being better met and fulfilled? To address this question, this paper adopted a mixed method to discover if, and how, blended learning meets students’ three basic psychological needs, specifically relatedness, competence and autonomy. Findings show that the first two need-constructs of relatedness and competence were fulfilled. The need for autonomy, however, was not being met due to school culture, assessment and the perhaps-habitual adherence to the conventional roles of teachers and students. This study also found that the three aforementioned psychological are positively related. In fact, blended learning has provided a new dimension of, and opportunity for, learning interactions for students of differing learning styles. Varieties of academic outputs released other expressions of “self” in many students, which enabled the first need for relatedness to be met. Blended learning outputs could bring a positive spiral of development of recognition from others, and meet the second need of competence later, leading to better identity formation, and ultimately again to relatedness.