The impact of developing a blended learning sub-system on students online learning engagement

Abstract

In this research, we show a development process of engagement sub-systems in a blended-learning management system and evaluate the impact of student interaction in the whole system. We develop special sub-systems for engagement purposes via forum, course rating, and class assignment modules. During the system development process, we employ continuous improvement methodology which helps to shorten the software delivery time without disturbing the overall operation. We evaluate the impact of engagement processes in terms of behavioral, emotional and cognitive aspects. Our evaluation results show that by employing the engagement sub-systems we have increased a 0.30 satisfaction point on average (1-5 Likert scale) for 11 evaluation survey questions distributed to 305 students during 2 times evaluation period. Another interesting finding from the surveys is that behavioral (discussion forum and attendance list sub-system) and cognitive (course rating sub-system) aspects have great influences for the students’ activities (class assignment sub-system) which finally has a great impact on their cognitive performances.

Keywords

• online learning, learning course management system, continuous improvement, software development, student engagement