The State of Art, Advantages, and Shortcomings of Blended Learning (BL) While Applied in the Fields of Social Sciences: A Review Article

Blended learning (BL) has been introduced and infused from elementary to higher educational settings. In most cases, overall, the studies found that the stakeholders of blended learning enjoy an added opportunity of a better teaching-learning environment utilizing both f2f and online means of learning. However, most of the studies conducted on blended learning were focused on some specific fields of study or were focused on educational institutions or learners to answer some specific academic inquiries throughout the studies. However, very few studies have been concretely conducted on applying blended learning in the fields of social sciences. Therefore, the current study took the initiative to investigate the state-ofthe- art, merits and challenges of blended learning applied in social science. Blended learning has simultaneously brought about many advantages and challenges in social science. Benefits of BL include the cost-effectiveness of education, the customizability of material development, flexibility of teaching-learning activities, swift communication, the flexibility of progress tracking, the efficacy of assessment, reduction of physical presence, avoidance of time consumption, global availability of courses without border concern, and the opportunity of self-paced learning. However, BL has different demerits too, such as classroom design, the lack of technical skills, digital literacy, and competency of teachers and students for utilizing BL, which leads the students to face miscommunication, procrastination, technical illiteracy, poor Internet connection, along with technological problems such as outdated software, hardware, technologies, etc. Even the stakeholders do not fully understand the nature, functions, advantages, and techniques for designing the course aligned to the needs of BL; hence, they create asymmetry between the ideal use and benefit and the real practice of BL. This study mainly aimed to bring the issues involved in applying BL to the fields of social sciences to light.

Keywords:Blended learning (hybrid learning); Face-to-face (f2f); Online; Pedagogy; Synchronous learning