The Multimodal Study of Blended Learning Using Mixed Sources: Dataset and Challenges of the SpeakUp Case

Social media applications have been proposed as a tool to complement students’ formal learning experiences, often to increase interactivity and participation. However, evidence regarding the benefits and challenges of such applications is still conflicting. In our latest study to explore this conundrum, we have gathered a multimodal dataset that showcases the teaching and learning processes co-occurring simultaneously on a physical space (face-to-face university lectures) and a digital one (SpeakUp, a social media app). The raw data, provided by different sources and informants, were transformed and analyzed using mixed (quantitative and qualitative) techniques. In this contribution, we describe the multiple pieces that composed our dataset, and the steps we took in the multimodal analyses to explore the learning experience occurring in both the physical and digital spaces. This dataset and analysis pipeline illustrates not only challenges and limitations specific to our study, but also more general ones. Several such challenges and limitations, commonplace in blended learning settings analyzed using mixed (multimodal) methods, are synthesized at the end of our paper.