Enhancing University Students’ Learning, Engagement and Satisfaction in a Blended Learning Environment: An Action Research Study

With the study reported here, two lecturers in Educational Technology tried to find out how they could improve their university students’ learning, their course engagement and their overall course satisfaction by systematically planning, observing and reflecting their teaching practices. For institutional reasons, they had been forced to switch from small-group seminars to large-group lectures in 2010-2011 and had since observed (1) relatively important declines in students’ knowledge and understanding (Bloom, 195 ), (2) low levels of student engagement during the lectures and (3) mixed levels of course satisfaction. During the winter semester 2012-2013 they thus wanted to explore various blended learning and interactive lecturing activities and to assess their effects. The aims of this research study are thus (1) to design and implement a meaningful and reasonable blended learning environment for students and (2) to roughly appraise its effects. Therefore an action-research process was established according emmis Mc aggart’s (1990) cyclical action-research model, where each cycle contains 4 steps: plan, action, observe and reflect. In addition, an intervention research process was also put in place to collect quantitative data about student learning, engagement and satisfaction. Planning, acting, observing and reflecting were done by the two lecturers. Oral presentations were prepared collaboratively; while one of the two lecturers delivered the presentation, the other one acted as the researcher, observing classroom activities, and implementing interactive learning activities; reflecting was done collaboratively after each lecture by writing down impressions. Several presentations were recorded (using a lecture recording software) and made available online for revision. Quantitative data were collected (1) from students’ actions in an online learning environment (moodle), comprising their viewing of various resources and their posting to assignments, and (2) from students’ scores at the final exam. Student satisfaction with the course had to be very generally assessed with the help of an optional anonymous course satisfaction survey set up by the university and could thus not be crossed with other types of data collected. Collected data are currently being analysed and will be presented at the conference. This research should help to better understand how university lecturing, often described as boring by students and leading to rather poor student performances, can be (1) enriched with the help of interactive and multimedia activities, as well as (2) extended by online learning activities. The objective is thus to contribute to the design of blended learning environments which (1) foster more sustainable learning in students, i.e. improving retention of knowledge and deepening understanding, and (2) lead to more responsible teaching, i.e. helping teachers to care about their students’ learning, engagement and satisfaction.