Improved design for blended university courses

Project introduction and background information

Universities have to deal with larger differences of engagement between students and more need for outcomes-based teaching and learning that allows for differences in learning styles. In addition for engineers, the rapidly changing world brings the need to engage students in diverse learning. These trends need to be tackled with outcomes-based teaching and engaging students within a rich setting of blended learning. Designing that type of education is a key challenge for the next years. 

Within this project an article, presentation and a CEE Blog on "Designing blended engineering courses" have been produced. The CEE Blog was published in February 2017 and the article was presented on the 2017 SEFI conference.

The Blog, article and presentation give guidelines for that design process based on literature and experience.

• Blog, article and conference presentation that can easily be used to improve course design.
• Focus on smart combinations of Teacher and Learners activity for top-quality university courses.
• Combination of theory and university experience.

Objective and expected outcomes

Designing outcome-based teaching and engaging students within a rich setting of blended learning. 

Results and learnings

Advice on design of blended learning based on literature and university experience.

Recommendations

1. Course design should start with a well-constructed curriculum and properly formulated Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs).
2. There are many types of Teaching and Learning Activity’s (TLAs) and they can be grouped into TLAs involving acquisition, inquiry, discussion, practice, collaboration and production.
3. Smart design of a combination of (many) types of TLAs is needed to create top-quality university courses.
4. All types of TLAs can be seen in traditional campus education and they can also be supported online.
5. There are limits in replacing on-campus TLAs by online versions. It seems that students need a minimum amount of on-campus teacher-student contact and higher-level engineering ILOs require rich on-campus collaboration work that cannot be completely offered online. Wageningen University & Research has started a project to investigate this.

Practical outcomes

See "Downloads" on the right side of this page for abstract, presentation and article. Or download the official copy of the article.