Seven-year study on effectiveness of traditional, blended, and online course offering models

Abstract

Seven years' study on the effectiveness of traditional, blended and on-line course offering models is presented. This study is based on the development and implementation of these three models on Electrical Machinery course offering. The traditional way of teaching of Electrical machinery course for EET and Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) majors has been conducted for years and therefore provides us with significant statistics on students' comprehension of the subject. The goal of a blended approach is to join the best aspects of both face-to-face and online instruction: classroom time can be used to engage students in advanced learning experiences, while the on-line portion of the course can provide students with content at any time of day allowing for an increase in scheduling flexibility for students. We share the data collected over several years of teaching all three models. To effectively assess the course outcomes, the direct and indirect assessment tools have been implemented. Analysis of the indirect data reveals some contradiction in students' responses: "they learned a great deal from the course" at the same time stating that they "had a hard time" earning high grades. As part of the direct assessment tool, we used the average and standard deviation results of the final exam scores, as well as a final grade distribution as a rubric for this assessment. We also compared these data with the ones available from the previous years when the course was taught utilizing traditional model. The direct assessment of these data reveals very interesting results. Even though the students' perception of the blended version of the EM course was not exceedingly positive, the direct assessment demonstrates that the students' performance participating in the blended learning was either the same or even better comparable to traditional and hybrid models. This fact almost looks like a negative correlation between the students' feedback and their actual performance in the class. In this article we discuss the structural details of all three course models, including the theoretical topics and experimental exercises of the course, the technology that has been used for the on-line materials development, implementation of the assessment tools to evaluate the students' progress, and students' perception of all three models.