Students’ engagement in a hybrid classroom: a comparison between face-to-face and virtual environments

Students have personal experience adjusting to face-to-face and virtual learning in any hybrid teaching and learning activity. In a hybrid classroom, engagement is always emphasised as a significant factor in academic achievement. Nevertheless, their engagement is expected to be inconsistent, particularly since they face challenges coping with the changes in the learning environment. With technology-based learning environments, the learning environments is a lot more technology-based. Investigating student engagement provides guidelines for monitoring the student’s direction in the learning process. Hence, this study examined how students react in a hybrid class. A causal-comparison research design was employed between hybrid face-to-face and online environments, comparing engagement guides to determine which environment promotes more positive engagement. A random sample was collected to generalise university students’ learning in a hybrid environment. Overall, students in a face-to-face environment showed relatively higher engagement (mean = 3.9730) than students in a virtual environment (mean = 3.770). They demonstrated relatively high-performance engagement (mean = 4.1626) and skill engagement (mean = 4.0244). Even though the result showed no significant difference in overall engagement between the two groups, further analysis showed a significant difference in performance engagement, indicating that the face-to-face group showed significantly higher performance engagement than the virtual group. The correlation analyses revealed a relationship between the engagement constructs, indicating participation has a higher correlation with emotion (in the face-to-face environment) and skill (in the virtual environment). The correlation results revealed a significant contribution from participation engagement, even though it has the lowest value in the descriptive statistics.