Blended learning in EST core courses

Overview

First core courses are important to engage students to major and support their motivation. The courses have been under constant development and we use e.g. continuous assessment, peer instruction and flipped classroom. In this project, we want to utilize MyCourses environment to support our pedagogical goals and confirm that the learning outcomes of the courses are achieved. Secondly, E-learning environment increases freedom and flexibility to courses, which hopefully increases the passing rate. In addition, automatic assessment with immediate feedback supports motivation and enables practicing the core skills as much as needed to achieve the minimum level of expertise. When the mechanical work is reduced, teaching staff can focus more time to the personal guidance and individual feedback.

The concrete goals of the project:

• part of weekly (pre-)assignments to automatic assessment (which requires creating new formulation for assignments)
• laboratory and simulation reports replaced with MyCourses assignments with automatic assessment
• new assignments to replace lecture quizzes
• new drill-type training assignments in MyCourses (e.g. prerequisite checks and multi-choice quizzes for revision)

The main goal of the project is not to move the teaching to web, but use opportunities of web to serve students’ learning.