Physical Learning Spaces and Teaching in the Blended Learning Landscape

Introduction

The proliferation of digitalized education has, perhaps counterintuitively, renewed an interest in physical learning spaces. Technology evangelists routinely evoke cloud services and “anytime, anywhere” discourses to downplay the importance of location – and, within education, to question the future viability of “bricks and mortar” institutions (Goodyear et al. 2018). Yet many teaching practitioners reject the view that online/mobile/blended learning automatically depreciates classroom interaction. They strive, instead, for alignment and complementarity between the physical and virtual spaces they use. They argue that face-to-face pedagogy in physical spaces can strongly and productively influence online teaching and learning and vice versa.

The research literature increasingly concurs. One research meta-analysis argues that courses using blended learning– where face-to-face teaching is systematically integrated with online activities – significantly outperform both...