USING BLENDED LEARNING TO DIFFERENTIATE THE LEARNING PROCESS IN A COMPUTER PROGRAMMING COURSE

Teaching freshmen in an engineering education can be challenging due to different level of skills, interests, knowledge and prior experience among the students. The engineering education at the University College of Southeast Norway (USN), campus Porsgrunn, offers several paths to admission. For instance, approximately 60 % of the students have a certificate of apprenticeship. Because of this, it is difficult to create one course design that fits all students. This study focuses on a course named "Object Oriented Programming and Databases". During the last three years, this course has been under major reconstruction. This provided an opportunity to review both the course content and the pedagogical approach to create a renewed course with new course material. In order to adjust to different needs, it was of interest to develop a flexible study model. A way to accomplish that was to use blended learning. Blended learning is characterized as a combination of traditional classroom activities and online media resources. Many courses today will meet these criteria, but it can be challenging to find the optimal blend of face-to-face and online activities. A socio-constructivist learning approach is assumed. Students are expected to build competence by engaging actively in team work and other learning activities facilitated by professors. The course consists of lectures and exercises, as well as individual and team-based work requirements. A key component is a student project implemented as a project-based learning element. To be able to challenge students at different levels and with various professional interests, a large amount of learning items is developed, including many videos. Students are also guided to additional resources, like e-books and other online material. Some of these resources are basic and aimed at students that find it hard to learn programming, while others aim at students who want to expand their skills beyond what's included in the curriculum. To ensure a good blending of course elements, the course has undergone frequent evaluations in the last three years. Feedback from students is used as a basis for new adaptations. In 2016 the students' motivation and work efforts were reported as high during the entire course. Many online resources were offered, but most of the students still attended the voluntary campus work. Students did very well on their projects. Videos were widely pointed out as being of particular importance. The students' final grades were very good, except for a small group that failed. Possible reasons for failing are discussed, as is the value of different learning elements and course resources used throughout the course. Some suggested improvements are to include even more flipped classroom-thinking and more videos related to especially basic items.