Transforming a Course to Blended Learning for Student Engagement

Abstract

The rising costs of higher education, along with the learning styles and needs of modern students, are changing the instructional landscape. Students of today do less and less well in the “lecture only” format, and staffing this format with live faculty is extremely expensive. MOOCs and other technology-heavy options are low cost but quite impersonal. Blended instruction has promise, with the ultimate goal of cost-efficient student engagement. This paper reports on a major course transformation to achieve student engagement in a large, formerly lecture-only course. The resulting blended-learning course features clickers, web-based operationalization of students helping students, media-rich interactive online materials, event credit, and newly added student-produced video tutorials. Results show that the addition of the student-produced video tutorials increased the student engagement in the course.