Evaluating a blended course for Japanese learners of English: why Quality Matters

Abstract

With the increase in the number of blended courses in higher education over the past few years, it is now increasingly important to assure the quality of online education by evaluating blended (or hybrid) courses from various aspects such as consistency of learning objectives with assessment, learning materials and technology used, and pedagogical and technical support among others. This article describes the evaluation phase of a blended course of English for general academic purposes (EGAP) targeting second-year undergraduate Japanese students mostly from the Faculties of Law, Letters, Economics, and Human Sciences at Osaka University. In this study, the researchers adopted an inclusive approach to blended course evaluation. In order to ensure the course quality from the outset, the Fifth Edition of Quality Matters Higher Education Course Design Rubric was utilized as the major reference. As part of the evaluation process, students' perception on the usefulness of the course was also measured quantitatively and qualitatively through an attitudinal survey instrument and open ended reflection questions. Eventually, to add an outsider positionality, the blended course was peer-reviewed by a certified reviewer from Quality Matters (QM) after having been self-reviewed by the researchers. The findings of the evaluation survey demonstrated students' overall satisfaction with the course, and their responses to the open-ended questions provided further insight into the educational and technical difficulties they encountered. The QM peer review also yielded a score of 70 out of 99, resulting in failure to meet the essential standards. However, comments from the peer reviewer guided the refinements and improvement of the course design, and the course currently meets all the requirements of the Higher Education Course Design Rubric (Fifth Edition) upon amendment. This study discusses the implications for design, development, and evaluation of English-as-a-foreign-language blended courses and provides practical tips for online/blended course designers. Further refinements to the existing course can be made in the future by implementing it several times with various groups of students.

Student Perceptions of the Impact of “Quality Matters” Certified Online Courses on their Learning and Engagement

“…Instructional materials for online courses are effective when they are written with precise objectives, learning activities, and assessments that are intertwined within the learning units (Kearns & Mancilla, 2017). Alizadeh et al (2019) suggested that although developing effective online instructional materials and resources is time-consuming, it is a valuable process for student satisfaction in online courses.…”

“…The focus of QM is to promote student learning in online and hybrid/blended courses, and the specific criteria evaluated under the rubric were selected as those characteristics shown to positively influence student learning (Legon & Runyon, 2007). Research suggests that well-designed online courses correlate positively to student attainment of learning outcomes, increased student-content interaction, ease of course navigation, decrease in student questions regarding course expectations, and higher student satisfaction (Alizadeh, Mehran, Koguchi, & Takemura, 2019). Swan et al (2012) revised a course based on the QM standards and found that students achieved better learning outcomes.…”

Impact of students evaluation of teaching: a text analysis of the teachers qualities by gender

“…Educational data mining and state-of-the-art There has been a lot of progress in the current literature about using data obtained from the educational settings to improve the intended processes (Wang & Zhu, 2019;Abu Zohair, 2019, Exter et al, 2019Munro, 2018;Dommett, Gardner, & van Tilburg, 2019;Alizadeh, Mehran, Koguchi, & Takemura, 2019). It is noteworthy that existing research has demonstrated that HEIs are increasingly datahungry, with the stakeholders (students, teachers, and administrators, for example) seeking data and study results for their own needs and use (Clark, 2015;Williamson, 2018).…”

“…Several institutions have had to integrate emerging educational technologies in their different activities to maintain or sustain the credibility and quality of their business models or operations in general (Kori, Pedaste, & Must, 2018). Therefore, recent research (Wang & Zhu, 2019;Abu Zohair, 2019, Exter et al, 2019Munro, 2018;Dommett et al, 2019;Alizadeh et al, 2019;Kori et al, 2018) has focused on overcoming some of the challenges within the educational processes to provide opportunities for innovative teaching and learning methods (e.g., through educational data mining).…”

Developing Schoology-Based E-Learning in the Dokkai Chukyu Learning Course

“…Blended learning, also known as hybrid learning, has been a buzz word in higher education over the past two decades. However, there is not much consensus over its definition [5]. Blended learning is a form of learning that combines traditional full-time form of teaching with modern forms of elearning, increasing the advantages and offsetting the disadvantages of each [6].…”