Abstract:

First year courses are extremely important for laying the proper foundation for studies at a university. They also have high enrollment numbers and in some universities, these students are lumped into one large class due to limited resources on campus. Recent studies show that first year students exhibit a low attendance rate at lectures and some students find themselves lost in these large classes. Therefore, this results in low passes rates, as the student is not able to grasp the material delivered in the course. In order to address this problem, blended learning was used whereby the student used an online classroom to supplement the regular face-to-face lectures. The online classroom was designed such that it provided the students with their own digital lesson plan with the ability to engage with the Lecturer or Tutor online. In this way the lecturer and tutor has a one to one interaction with students in a large class. To determine the effectiveness of the strategy, we analyzed the logs from the online classroom to determine the activity levels of the students throughout the semester. A qualitative study was also performed to obtain feedback on the student’s perceptions on the digital lesson plan and the lecturer’s impressions on student interactions. The results indicate that students are very active in the online classroom throughout the semester and perform better than conventionally taught students.

Keywords:

Blending Learning, Student Participation, e-learning, On-line Classroom.