A Study of the Effect on the Enhanced Model of Online Courses for Elementary School Students in Class

Abstract

In terms of the application of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the elementary schools, it requires both the online courses and actual classroom courses to make it work. Therefore, SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses) is more suitable than MOOCs for elementary school students. However, the elementary school students are not mature enough regarding their mental age; in addition, their autonomous learning ability is insufficient to handle all courses; also, in actual classroom teaching, their in-class discussion participation is low. Therefore, this study hopes to design a improved SPOCs teaching method to solve the problems of the current SPOC teaching method might encounter. This paper aims to explore the impact of different teaching methods (traditional lecture teaching method, conventional SPOC teaching method and improved SPOCs teaching method) on students' learning outcome of butterfly's ecological knowledge, the degree of classroom discussion and the viewing rate of pre-class films. The paper would provide a solid reference for elementary school Massive Open Online Course teaching or SPOCs (Small Private Online Course) teaching. For the experiment of this study, the number of valid samples were 75 elementary Grade 5 students from 3 different classes in Tainan. The three classes were randomly divided into three groups: one experimental group and two control groups. The research method was a quasi-experimental study, and the butterfly ecological knowledge teaching was carried out for five weeks. “Butterfly Ecology Knowledge Learning Platform” was implemented during the experimental teaching process. All students from the three groups received the “Butterfly Ecological Knowledge Learning Test” in order to recognize student's learning outcomes. The experiment results show the learning outcome of students who received “improved SPOC teaching method” in butterfly ecological knowledge is significantly better than those who received “traditional lecture method” and the “conventional SPOCs teaching method”.