Manuscript received October 9, 2022; revised November 15, 2022; accepted December 12, 2022.
Abstract—As the number of students entering higher education increases with a growing diversity of background, educators of programming courses face increasing challenges. Different teaching pedagogies need to be explored for students with different background knowledge. Some students find programming courses difficult to understand and practice. It may lead to de-motivation and disengagement in learning process with consequential impact on their grades. Addressing these issues demands approaches for effective teaching programming courses to multidisciplinary cohorts. This article investigates how computing science (CS) and engineering cohorts respond differently to teaching approaches in a common module, Fundamentals of Programming. Both traditional teacher-centric teaching and a blended learner-centric approach have been explored in a diverse group of students. The blended learner-centric approach combines classroom teaching and self-paced blended learning using work examples videos method. These two teaching approaches have been evaluated in Academic Year 2019/2020. It can be seen from the evaluation results of 92 CS and 150 Engineering students who participate in this research that the performance is improved by about 5% through blended learner-centric approach. It is further observed that quantitatively the performance gap between CS and Engineering students has been reduced. Questionnaire survey has also been conducted with 54 CS and 89 Engineering students being responded. The learners’ perceptions of the blended learner-centric approach have also been compared between these two cohorts.
Index Terms—Diverse learners, learners’ difference, learners perceptions, learning of programming
Qi Cao, Chee Kiat Seow, and Sye Loong Keoh are with School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK.
Li Hong Idris Lim is with School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK.
Vicki Dale, Sarah Honeychurch, and Nathalie Tasler are with Academic and Digital Development, University of Glasgow, UK.
Duncan Bremner is with James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK.
*Correspondence: qi.cao@Glasgow.ac.uk (Q.C.)
Cite: Qi Cao*, Chee Kiat Seow, Li Hong Idris Lim, Sye Loong Keoh, Vicki Dale, Sarah Honeychurch, Nathalie Tasler, and Duncan Bremner, "Learners’ Differences in Blended Learner-Centric Approach for a Common Programming Subject," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 906-913, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).