To address the potential pitfalls associated with basic course management (such as student participation) and the role of the instructor in a blended learning format, Hoffman recommends a team teaching approach or the immersing of facilitators in a blended learning program themselves. Presumably, professors could achieve this by introducing select technologies in standard classroom settings (such as offering in-class surveys through mobile devices) to determine how effectively they perform. Regarding the temptation to employ technology for technology s sake, Hoffman suggests that practitioners test given technologies in smaller projects before committing them to larger ones. Jennifer Hoffmann seeks to address these potential obstacles in her trade article for the blended learning delivery design company, InSync Training. Manjot Kaur, for example, identifies a number of obstacles to successful blended learning, such as the indiscriminate adoption of technology, the necessity for the instructor to redefine her/his role in the course, challenges related to managing student participation and activities, and the need to rethink the instructional design in order to match delivery modes to course objectives and learning outcomes. Despite its ability to offer creative ways to use technology to enhance and to support the classroom experience, blended learning has its challenges. Meanwhile, synchronous technologies such as video conferencing and Skype have been used at times to connect classes with students abroad in order to provide a global perspective on course topics. Spiliotopoulos goes on to provide concrete examples where professors have leveraged students proclivity towards social media such as Twitter and Facebook to exploit these platforms in assignments, discussions and peer reviews of student presentations. The choice of technology should be such that it enhances student learning and engagement, while also providing flexibility within the learning environment. As Valia Spiliotopoulos points out, the use of technology in the course delivery is a key component to blended learning and should be linked to specific learning outcomes. While not necessarily preferred by all students and in all situations, blended learning has been reported to enhance academic performance in some instances and continues to draw interest amongst the engineering educational community (see, for example, and ). As technology developed, later incarnations of blended learning utilized a variety of asynchronous digital platforms such as forums, wikis, and blogs, and leveraged both computers and mobile devices in their delivery. The term was first referenced in the literature in 2, being associated with a study examining the combination of play and work in preschool education, but soon after became synonymous with a mix of instructor-led and digitally disseminated content. INTRODUCTION Blended (or hybrid) learning is an instructional method that combines face-to-face and distributed deliveries of content, where the latter typically involves computer-based technologies. Keywords: blended learning, hybrid learning, casecontrol study, engineering design course, academic performance 1. Instead, the blended learning cohort showed the lowest proportion of students achieving below % on the final exam. While the class average in the final exam for each year tracked more-or-less the entrance CGPA, the distribution of grades did not. Meanwhile, the mean cumulative grade point average (CGPA) of each cohort varied from a minimum of 6.71 ± 1.21 (mean ± SD) in 212 to a maximum of 7. Course enrolment during the study period varied from a minimum of 68 students for the 212 cohort to a maximum of 122 registrations in 217. Specifically, the final exam results following the blended learning approach (217) are compared to those from the previous four years (212 to 216), where the latter delivery was based on a classical lecture style. 1 A CASE-CONTROL STUDY OF STUDENT PERFORMANCE IN A BLENDED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT David Taylor University of Ottawa Abstract This paper discusses student performance in a fourth-year computer-aided design course under two delivery modes: one using a blended learning format and the other based on a classical lecture style.
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