Implementation and Assessment of a Blended Learning Environment as an Approach to Better Engage Students in a Large Systems Design Class

Blended learning refers to combining traditional face-to-face learning environments with online education tools and approaches. With the ubiquitous use of laptops by students and the proliferation of low and no cost tools to facilitate online education, opportunities for blended learning are more available now than ever before. Additionally, many universities are facing growing enrollments that push the limits on the scalability of classroom pedagogies. For example, providing students the opportunity to orally present technical work becomes challenging as the number of students per class grows to large numbers. Furthermore, decades of prior research in education have shown the effectiveness of formative feedback and an authentic, active, and collaborative environment in promoting student learning. It is in this context that the authors redesigned a class to take advantage of several blended learning approaches in an effort to provide a higher quality learning environment. The purpose of this project is to implement and assess the impact of integrating blended learning approaches in a case study based systems design class that faces growing enrollment. The goals of integrating blended learning approaches into this class were to provide better formative feedback more quickly to students, to continue to integrate authentic work in the class through case studies, and to provide a more active and collaborative learning environment. The blended experience for this class has several components, including • Student teams recording presentations with video-capture software (instead of just turning in PowerPoint files for feedback). • Peer review of aforementioned recorded presentations and other deliverables, utilizing an online peer-management system (called “PRAZE”) to reduce the complexity of administering peer review for a large number of students • In-class polls using Google Docs • Discussion board forums for student questions, utilizing an online system called Piazza, and • Video-capture of lectures covering several of the core topics, thereby allowing the instructors to spend class time on more engaging ways of helping students learn new topics (i.e., flipping the classroom) The assessment plan for this project is multidimensional and focuses on the effectiveness of the blended approaches in promoting quick formative feedback, active learning approaches, and collaborative learning ... all in an effort to improve student learning. To this end, evaluation will include an end-of-course survey aimed at collecting student perceptions of the different blended approaches, surveys of students related to self-efficacy and their perceptions of the feedback received on case studies, the matching of data on who watches online lectures to grades on specific assignments and questions, content analysis of course feedback as compared to prior years, and observations by instructors and teaching assistants. In this paper, the overall assessment approach is presented along with results from the end-of-course survey.