I’ve spent years arguing that online teaching is not face-to-face teaching with a webcam attached. A new study by Eren and Dikilitaş (2025) in Interactive Learning Environments gives that argument empirical teeth. They watched 11 EFL instructors work the same blended program in both modalities, tracked 352 students across 22 classes, and came back with a finding that should give every blended-program designer pause: the same teacher, using the same toolkit, can build engagement in person and chip away at it online.
Their concept for what’s happening is modality-contingent motivation. A motivational move isn’t motivating or demotivating on its own. Its meaning shifts with the medium.
Why Teachers Default to Structure Online
Here’s the part I find most useful for teacher educators. Eren and Dikilitaş are not saying teachers chose competence over connection because they don’t value connection. They’re saying teachers defaulted to competence because connection requires more deliberate engineering online than it does in a physical room.
In a classroom, relatedness builds itself. Students walk in, banter happens, the teacher reads the room, side conversations turn into group work. Online, none of that is automatic. Every relational moment has to be planned, prompted, and protected. Without that planning, teachers reach for what’s easiest to operationalize: the screen-shared scaffold, the structured slide, the neutral feedback in the chat.
This isn’t a teacher problem. It’s a design problem. As Singh et al. (2021), cited in the paper, put it: hybrid learning needs to be pedagogically differentiated, not just logistically coordinated.
What This Looks Like on the Ground
The recommendations Eren and Dikilitaş offer are practical.
A scaffold offered in a Zoom breakout room without any relational signal will be heard as evaluation. The same scaffold offered after a 30-second verbal check-in, with the teacher naming the student who asked the question, lands completely differently. The cognitive content is identical. The relational frame is not.
Their suggested moves are small but cumulative: predictable check-in cycles, name-based acknowledgment of contributions, rotating peer roles in breakout rooms, quick polls that offer real choice, paired writing spaces. None of these are technological breakthroughs. They’re relational micro-routines that have to be deliberately built into the lesson.
I’d push the argument further. We’ve spent five years training teachers on platforms and far less time training them on how to build autonomy and belonging through those same platforms. Professional development that stops at “here’s how the breakout room works” produces teachers who use breakout rooms as silence machines.
How I Read This in 2026
We’re well past the emergency-remote phase of online teaching. Most institutions have settled into blended delivery on the assumption that the technology problem is solved. Eren and Dikilitaş’s findings suggest the technology problem was the easy part. The motivational architecture is harder, more contextual, and demands ongoing pedagogical work.
As the authors stated: “the central question becomes not whether teachers use motivational strategies, but how these strategies are contextually implemented across modalities and how students react to these strategies” (p. 9).
I agree. The blended programs that work in 2026 will be the ones that stop measuring teacher effort by what’s on the slide and start measuring it by what’s happening in the silences between the slides.
The Limitations Worth Naming
This is one institution, in Turkey, with 11 instructors and 22 class sessions. The negative correlation in online classes is striking but exploratory. We need bigger multi-institutional samples and classroom discourse analysis to confirm whether competence-heavy online practice really is being read as controlling.
That said, the conceptual contribution is what I’ll take forward. Modality-contingent motivation gives us a name for something many of us have been observing without quite knowing how to articulate.
References
Eren, E. U., & Dikilitaş, K. (2025). Teachers’ motivational strategies and student motivation across teaching modalities. Interactive Learning Environments. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2025.2601300