TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED TEACHING, AN APPROACH TO IMPROVE ACTIVITY-BASED LEARNING FOR INSTRUCTING COMPUTER PROGRAMMING WITHIN A BLENDED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

This study seeks to assess a technology enhanced teaching and learning approach to improve active learning within a blended environment for undergraduate students in Ghana Technology University College. The driving force for this study is that the traditional method of teaching computer programming has not yield any positive impact among most undergraduate students which is a well known problem among most African computing science faculties and departments. This is because, students lacks the practical and technical exposure of the course, coupled with the traditional method of teaching and consequently, yielding to low performance among undergraduate computing sciences students.

In view of this, the study adopted technology enhanced tools, active learning approach and the university’s Learning Management System (LMS) to blend the instruction of computer programming for a semester among undergraduate students. The study adopted both qualitative and quantitative data to capture information from the students and the lecturer’s experience. Descriptive statistics, content analysis and grounded theory coding approach were used to analyses the data.

The findings from the study indicated that the performance of the students has improved, students were actively involved in the practical sessions of the class, students contributed significantly on the technology enhance tools used and consequently responded positively on the university’s LMS. Also, the blended learning approach aided the students to access the LMS seamlessly and submitted practical assignments promptly and thus, demonstrating a significant achievement of the course objectives.