  Blended learning is generally defined as the combination of traditional
face-to-face learning and online learning. This learning mode has been widely
used in advanced education across the globe due to the COVID-19 pandemic's
social distance restriction as well as the development of technology. Online
learning plays an important role in blended learning, and as it requires more
student autonomy, the quality of blended learning in advanced education has
been a persistent concern. Existing literature offers several elements and
frameworks regarding evaluating the quality of blended learning. However, most
of them either have different favours for evaluation perspectives or simply
offer general guidance for evaluation, reducing the completeness, objectivity
and practicalness of related works. In order to carry out a more intuitive and
comprehensive evaluation framework, this paper proposes a hierarchy-based
analysis approach. Applying gradient boosting model and feature importance
evaluation method, this approach mainly analyses student engagement and its
three identified dimensions (behavioral engagement, emotional engagement,
cognitive engagement) to eliminate some existing stubborn problems when it
comes to blended learning evaluation. The results show that cognitive
engagement and emotional engagement play a more important role in blended
learning evaluation, implying that these two should be considered to improve
for better learning as well as teaching quality.
