Understanding students views and preferences towards Blended Learning in a Civil engineering Course

This paper presents a case study of students’ views and preferences towards a Blended Learning (BL) course in Mechanics of Materials. The BL approach was introduced with the aim to enhance student’s active participation in and outside classroom, as well as to allow the students to acquire knowledge and skills by exploring their individual learning styles. In this approach, the professor videotaped classes and asked the students to watch them prior to the face-to- face sessions. In the face-to-face sessions, the students discussed the concepts introduced in the videos within their work teams and typically used physical models (i.e. physical copies of objects or phenomena) to enhance and facilitate understanding. In this paper, the authors presents the results of a survey responded by 98 out of 104 participants. The questionnaire was designed to measure the students’ views and preferences towards BL. This study concludes that the majority of students have a good perception towards BL. They consider the class time is used in a more effective and efficient way, compared to traditional engineering lecture approaches. On the other hand, they think that by using the BL methodology, they have to work extra time inside and outside the classroom and see this as a negative aspect.