The global surge of short form media across social media accounts such as TikTok and Instagram reels is shown to attract increased engagement within higher education student cohorts with embedded algorithms continuously stimulating personal interest (Yang et al., 2025). Concurrently, one Irish university study revealed students share devices for both entertainment and online learning engagement purposes (Stone and Lowney, 2022). However, recent Irish higher education insight highlights a current resistance regarding self-regulated motivation and engagement towards blended learning activities (Kitching, 2024). Interestingly, such findings emerge in recent years in Europe, identifying significant mobile device distractions were identified impacting blended episodes, within the surge of digital distractors (Aivaz and Teodorescu, 2022). Similarly, developing discourse of short form media argues that short form entertainment poses compulsive distraction effects toward attentional engagement in learning (Yang et al., 2025). This prompts further investigation into students transitions into differing digital activities from the same screen, and how this can impact student experiences within online learning, with insights surrounding attentional engagement and learning effectiveness.

This paper will share a student study from a qualitative case study of undergraduate students within DCU surrounding multi-purpose of screens, short form media influence, and insight of a consensus of fellow student short form consumption towards the blended student engagement. The aim of this paper is to propose student centred feedback to identify a specified relationship between short form content with blended learning is to propose learning opportunities towards learning design in a new era of digital content engagement.