Abstract:

The aim of this study was how to engage upper secondary level students in learning in a blended learning environment. A specific pedagogical script was prepared based on the Engaging Learning Environment (ELE) developed by Lonka (2012; 2018) and then tested in practice. Digital course material about entrepreneurship and global business was designed to follow the pedagogical script on a digital learning platform called Claned, which has a strong emphasis on learning analytics. As a result, 4 digital Business courses were deployed. Each course consisted of several learning modules and each module formed its own engaging learning process based on the pedagogical script. This was put into practice by designing various assignment types that were in line with the pedagogical aims and process of ELE.

The assignment types were: anchor (catching interest), goals (for setting the learning aims), intro (for introducing the module’s theme), comments (for collaborative discussion), facts (for theoretical approach), material (for deepening individual understanding), applied (for summarizing and utilizing learned in case-based activities) and reflection (for evaluating the accomplishment of the learning goals).

The data was collected during the piloting phase of the courses, where 261 students filled in open-ended questions about how they experienced the different assignments. The students were asked to name two assignments that they felt especially relevant from the perspective of their own learning (Smith & Osborn, 2008). The answers were qualitatively content-analysed by comparing the reported experiences with an operationalization of the ELE model to track possible fits between the students’ experiences and ELE. If possible, the reported experiences were then linked back to the specific assignments that originally sparked them.

Based on the qualitative analysis the most dominating fitting experiences were: relevance (21% of the total 236 reported positive experiences), deepening of understanding (19%), meaningfulness (14%), interest (10%), transfer (9%) and knowledge creation (9%). Interestingly, 52% of all reported positive learning experiences could be tracked back to applied assignments, and they proved to be the only assignment type that could truly promote transfer.
The results were then compared with the learning analytics provided by Claned to qualify the qualitative findings (altogether 2787 evaluations).

The analytics was gathered through event-contingent experience sampling (Hektner, 2007), where the students were automatically asked to estimate their experienced rate of challenge, interest and competence during an assignment (scale 1-5). The results of the analytics supported the findings of the qualitative results: Based on the analytics, applied assignments turned out to be the most prominent from the perspective of learning, since they obtained best evaluations when it came to the combination of high rates in interest, challenge and competence.

By combining the findings of the qualitative analysis and learning analytics, the single most successful applied assignments from the perspective of promoting engaging learning could be tracked down. Furthermore, abductive reasoning (Paavola et al, 2006) was used to investigate, which specific pedagogical practices within the most successful applied assignments could have led to the wide spectrum of positive learning experiences.

Keywords:

Blended learning, digital learning environment, entrepreneurship education, engagement.