How to Support Students’ Self-Regulated Learning in Times of Crisis: An Embedded Technology-Based Intervention in Blended Learning Pedagogies

With the increasing prevalence of technology-enhanced learning environments, self-regulated learning (SRL) has become a crucial skill for management students and graduates in the 21st century. Self-regulated learners can take control of their own learning process by setting learning objectives and selecting appropriate learning strategies. As a result of the recent COVID-19 crisis, universities were compelled to shift to online course delivery, which greatly reduced social interaction between educators and learners and challenged educators’ feedback practices. To address this issue, we developed and embedded a technology-based intervention with temporal-proximate and regular formative feedback assessments in a large-scale management course to promote graduate students’ SRL practices. We evaluated the intervention in a quasi-experiment, which found that students with the embedded SRL intervention had higher self-assessment and learning outcome scores and lower absolute self-assessment deviation. Our study makes at least three contributions. First, we shed light on students’ SRL strategies in times of emergency remote learning, highlighting their extensive need for social support and comparison. Second, we extend the literature on SRL and social-cognitive theory by unveiling a hidden effect when embedding temporal-proximate and regular interventions. Third, we contribute an empirically evaluated intervention to foster students’ SRL in blended learning and online pedagogies.