Blended Learning in an Upper Year Engineering Course: The Relationship between Students’ Program Year, Interactions with Online Material, and Academic Performance

Abstract

At a comprehensive, public university in Western Canada, a fourth-year course in risk and safety management was recently made a requirement for all engineering students; depending on their program, students may take this course in their second, third, fourth, or fifth year of their program. As a result of increasing class sizes, this course was shifted from traditional to blended instruction. Since blending and opening this course to students with varying years of undergraduate engineering experience, instructors noted a difference in students’ maturity (e.g., a change in quantity and quality of in-class discussion, questions, participation, student-teacher interactions, and problem solving capabilities) and questioned whether this impacted their interactions with online material. Research examining the impact of blended learning in Engineering has primarily focused on large first-year undergraduate courses; research about blended learning in upper-year engineering courses is sparse. Studies investigating courses with students of varying years of experience in the program are virtually non-existent. Therefore, to better understand students’ interactions with online material during blended learning as connected to years in their program, we examined the relationship between levels of interaction and performance of students by year in program. This study analyzed approximately 2000 students’ interactions with online material and performance across five sections of a risk-management course in engineering. We found that students who had completed more years of their program interacted less with online material than students earlier in their undergraduate careers. Academic performance, on the other hand, was higher for students who had interacted more with online material and slightly higher for students who had completed more years in their program. These results suggest that the delivery of instructional materials may need to be tailored to students’ year in their program. Further implications and areas of future study are discussed.

Examination of Students’ Academic Performance in Selected Mechanical Engineering Courses Prior-to-and-During COVID-19 Era

“…It can be inferred from the foregoing that the web-based learning mode does not yield negative response in respect of the performance of students who offered all the four mechanical engineering courses, thus making it a reliable alternative to in-person or at least a suitable complement to in-person in the online-offline hybrid mode during the ongoing COVID-19 era and other inevitable constraints in the future. Self-regulation, flexibility, and continuity in learning, which have been identified as key merits of the online learning mode [6], confirm the choice of the online mode as a suitable alternative [26][27][28] or complement to in-person learning in the online-offline hybrid mode, otherwise known as the blended learning mode, which has been advocated in a number of previous studies [23,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36].…”

Experiencias en formación virtual de ingeniería: una reseña bibliográfica sistematizada

“…Por último, si bien esta investigación puede describirse como una experiencia de innovación curricular, sus resultados proporcionan información relevante en el diseño de cursos virtuales, indicando el efecto de impartir un curso online flexible que los estudiantes pueden tomar en su segundo, tercer, cuarto o quinto año del programa. Los resultados indican diferencias entre la relación de los estudiantes con el material y los resultados de aprendizaje, indicando que el tipo de material de instrucción debe adaptarse al año de los estudiantes en su programa, simplificándolos en la medida que se dictan para estudiantes de años superiores [27].…”

“…Respecto a nuestros hallazgos sobre el diseño de cursos elearning, se hace presente la importancia de diseños personalizados, de acuerdo con las características propias de los estudiantes [72] y para lo cual se puede tener en consideración elementos clave o diferenciadores como el rendimiento académico [27], [28]. A la vez que la dimensión gráfica, sin sesgos de género, también juega un papel interesante de tener en consideración [73], el dinamismo e interacción deben ser un foco central del diseño, así como la facilidad de acceso y uso [74].…”