Academic performance in blended-learning and face-to-face university teaching

Abstract

The benefits promoted by the use of the blended-learning model in higher education have been well studied from a general point of view, but no conclusive results have been achieved so far. However, within the field of engineering, these researches are quite scarce and become even rarer in the case of researches trying to demonstrate whether the benefits of blended learning could be compared to those achieved by classroom education. Learning platforms allow us to incorporate rich learning resources, interactive tools that foster collaborative learning, student to student, student to professor and student-professor-student interactions. Learning platforms also give us the opportunity of incorporating tasks that allow students to check the progress of their own learning processes. This paper presents the results of a research carried out at the School of Technical Architecture of the University of Seville with students enrolled in the Materials Science course. The aim of this investigation was to compare students’ results when trained by means of traditional teaching and blended learning. In order to achieve our goal we followed a quasi-experimental, descriptive and correlational design applied to two non-equivalent groups. The results indicated that in the blended-learning model, the students had more academic success as compared to traditional teaching. © 2016, Canadian Center of Science and Education. All rights reserved.