Structural Hybridization of Teaching-Learning Platforms and Its Influence in (Re)Orienting Working-Students' Mental Modes for Knowledge Acquisition

The purpose of this paper was to understand how Structural Hybridization of Teaching-Learning Platforms (re)orient the mental modes of working-students in the process of quality knowledge acquisition. Since 2020, the world has faced a historic challenge caused by the COVID-19 pandemic whose spread across the globe temporarily brought a halt to economic, social and learning activities that form part of peoples everyday lives. In the academic sector, the “teaching-learning” activity, which used to be conducted face-to-face, was shifted to online using virtual platforms. Despite this structural shift, the use of face-to-face learning is still considered necessary, thus prompting its integration with the virtual platforms to create hybrid teaching-learning platforms. In Ghana most universities have Graduate programmes designed for working-persons that are delivered weekdays’ evenings and/or weekends, using the hybrid system, which enables a “teaching-learning” roll-over between face-to-face and virtual platforms. Despite the usefulness of such hybrid platform, its influence in (re)orienting the mental modes of working-students towards quality knowledge acquisition remains unexplored. Building on the notion that an individual’s self-regulation system takes shape and gets transformed over lengthy periods of time, with its problems and potentials being understood only against its own history, the argument that an individual’s mode of mental mode may result in his/her (in)ability to accurately acquire knowledge is explored, as underlined by the following question; Does the structural hybridization of onsite and online teaching-learning models entail new mental demands and systemic expectations from working-students in their pedagogical process of quality Knowledge Acquisition? This study is methodologically guided by the SSAT premise that the discovery of goals is essential to true activity that can be transformed into contradictions which may influence a person’s metal mode as well as expand into a qualitatively new organizational activity structure and systemic activity contexts. It was also encapsulated in Bedny and Karwowski’s well-established knowledge that activities of individuals are realized by goal-directed actions, informed either by mental or motor conscious processes, and the notion that one cannot perform a complex motor task without significant mental effort and concentration. Thus, the relationship between the different components of the working-students’ knowledge acquisition (i.e. motor and cognitive) is considered critical in evaluating the complexity associated, not only with the cognitive and motor aspects of the teaching-learning activity, but also with its emotional-motivational components. The systemic analytical approach is used to evaluate the cognitive aspect of complexity entailed in the working-students’ knowledge acquisition activity that depend on the specificity of information processing, and those emotional-motivational aspects of complexity that reflect the energetic aspects of their knowledge acquisition activity using the hybrid teaching-learning platform. This study is the first to be carried out in the education sector in Ghana and the findings will provide useful insight in the systemic design and structuring of hybridized teaching-learning systems (entailing a combination of face-to-face and virtual platforms) to enable quality transitions in the mental modes and wellness of working-students towards knowledge acquisition.