Closing the urban-rural higher education quality gap with blended learning in a STEM course at three Cambodian universities

Governments have identified higher education as a major driver of economic competitiveness and have invested substantially on improving the access of their population to higher education. While the improvement of access through the expansion of universities has helped to build a foundation for the development of the higher education sector in developing countries, there are quality gaps between universities, especially between urban and rural ones. This chapter presents a case study of how blended learning has been adopted to close the urban-rural quality gap of a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) course at three universities in the Kingdom of Cambodia. The country’s flagship university in the city worked collaboratively with two provincial universities to design and develop a STEM course with online resources and activities that were then implemented at all three universities using a blended learning approach. This chapter examines how the blended learning approach is adopted in the rural university contexts to address the existing quality and access challenges of teaching and learning in the STEM course. It documents the impact of the blended learning approach through interviews and focus-group discussions with the key stakeholders. Based on the enabling and hindering factors identified in the study, the chapter discusses and suggests the blended learning strategies to close the urban-rural quality gap of STEM teaching and learning in the Cambodian higher education context. Copyright © 2021 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.