The blended teaching strategy, which combines online and traditional face-to-face components, has gained popularity worldwide owing to its advantages, including enhanced student engagement and improved academic achievement. However, many South African schools continue to fall behind due to socioeconomic challenges. Specifically, a previous study has identified these challenges as a lack of funding for infrastructure and services, such as internet access, appropriate devices like computers and science equipment, as well as professional development for teachers. Additionally, there is insufficient family support to help guide students at home. Nevertheless, in a previous study conducted in South Africa, the implementation of blended teaching effectively fostered student engagement, defined as the degree to which students participate in their learning and resulted in higher academic achievement in organic chemistry. Notably, students regard this discipline as complex and is linked to student underachievement.

In the previous study, Group 1 was taught organic chemistry concepts using a blended teaching strategy that combined flipped learning (FL) and active blended learning (ABL) approaches. In Group 2, a passive form of the traditional face-to-face teaching method was used. Consequently, the present study evaluated the blended teaching programme applied in this previous study to teach organic chemistry to Grade 12 students from one of the many quintile-level 1 schools in South Africa. In South Africa, a quintile system ranks schools based on their resources, with underprivileged schools occupying lower quintile levels (1, 2 and 3) and more affluent ones belonging to higher quintile levels (4 and 5).

The present study aimed to propose a blended teaching model for underprivileged schools in South Africa based on the design features identified through the evaluation process using a qualitative approach. This involved purposively selecting twelve students from Groups 1 and 2 as well as their two teachers to participate in a semi-structured discussion. Six students were purposively selected from each of the subgroups based on their performance in the standardised organic chemistry test (2 above average, 2 average and 2 below average). Inferences from the previous quantitative study and the present thematically analysed dataset were used to identify key design features of the proposed blended teaching model for South African underprivileged schools. These features include combining FL and ABL models, training teachers for a longer duration, utilising videos, quizzes, simulations, gamification, and offline Moodle apps, incentivising pre-class work and giving students three attempts to complete online quizzes.

Additionally, the previous study showed that Group 1’s mean academic achievement of 41.74 % was significantly higher than that of Group 2, which was 27.18 % as the p-value=0.00< 0.05. Similarly, the two-sided tests showed that Group 1’s means for cognitive and affective engagement were significantly higher than those of Group 2 considering that the p-value=0.021< 0.05 and p-value=0.00< 0.05, respectively. Based on this, the learning activities used in the blended teaching model being presented need to promote cognitive and affective engagement. The study has implications for educational practitioners wishing to design blended teaching models for underprivileged schools in South Africa and most developing nations.

Keywords: Blended teaching model, underprivileged schools, key design features, organic chemistry.