One Class, Two Worlds: Understanding transactional distance in hybrid learning

In recent years, higher education institutions have increasingly adopted hybrid formats in which online and onsite students participate simultaneously. This development is often presented as a flexible response to changing educational demands, globalization, and technological advancement. While hybrid education offers opportunities to broaden access and connect geographically dispersed learners, it also introduces challenges related to interaction, engagement, and the psychological dimensions of learning. A central concept for understanding these dynamics is transactional distance (TD), a theory originally developed for distance education that describes the psychological and communicative distance between learners and teachers. Despite its relevance, TD has rarely been systematically adapted to hybrid contexts, where students share the same class in time but not in space. This dissertation investigates the challenges of hybrid education and examines how TD shapes interaction, engagement, and learning experiences for both online and onsite students. Across four studies, this research explores how hybrid formats influence participation, relational dynamics, and instructional design from student and teacher perspectives. The first study examines hybrid teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic from the teacher’s perspective. It reveals the tensions teachers experience when simultaneously teaching, moderating online participation, and managing technical issues. Teachers struggled to divide their attention between online and onsite students, often resulting in online students feeling overlooked and teachers experiencing greater distance from them. The second study investigates the experiences of students and teachers in a small hybrid course. It shows that online students require more encouragement to participate and are sometimes not perceived as full participants by their onsite peers. Although teachers encouraged online participation, contributions tended to remain superficial. Both students and teachers attributed this to the lack of informal interaction for online students, which limited their sense of connection and confidence to engage. The third study presents a systematic review of the literature on TD in hybrid education. It finds that while TD is frequently referenced, its core concepts are rarely adapted to hybrid learning. The review identifies lesson design and pre-structured interaction as key factors in reducing TD and argues that intentional pre-planning is essential to ensure equitable participation across modalities. The fourth study focuses on international hybrid learning in a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) course involving students and teachers from the Netherlands and the UK. Using a mixed-methods approach, it shows that hybrid sessions enable informal interaction and spontaneous conversation that support rapport and engagement. Fully online sessions tended to feel more formal and psychologically distant, while technical challenges continued to affect cohesion. Together, these studies demonstrate that hybrid education is not a one-size-fits-all solution but a complex relational learning environment. TD theory remains valuable but requires adaptation to account for hybrid modalities. This dissertation highlights the importance of structured interaction, informal communication, and deliberate design, concluding that hybrid education can support inclusion and continuity of learning only when implemented with sustained attention to equity, interaction, and human connection.