Abstract
University education approaches related to the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), have generally particularized on teaching activity and learning programs which are commonly understood as reoriented lessons that fuse theoretic concepts interweaved with practical activities. In this context, team work has been widely acknowledged as a means to conduct practical and hands-on lessons, and has been revealed to be successful in the achievement of exercise resolution and design tasks. Besides this, methodologies sustained by ICT resources such as online or blended approaches, have also reported numerous benefits for students’ active learning. However, such benefits have to be fully validated within the particular teaching context, which may facilitate student achievement to a greater or lesser extent. In this work, we analyze the impact of attendance modalities on the learning performance of a STEM-related course on “Machines and Mechanisms Theory”, in which practical lessons are tackled through a team work approach. The validity of the results is reinforced by group testing and statistical tests with a sample of 128 participants. Students were arranged in a test group (online attendance) and in a control group (face-to-face attendance) to proceed with team work during the practical lessons. Thus, the efficacy of distance and in situ methodologies is compared. Moreover, additional variables have also been compared according to the historical record of the course, in regards to previous academic years. Finally, students’ insights about the collaborative side of this program, self-knowledge and satisfaction with the proposal have also been reported by a custom questionnaire. The results demonstrate greater performance and satisfaction amongst participants in the face-to-face modality. Such a modality is prooven to be statistically significant for the final achievement of students in detriment to online attendance.
Highlights
Over the last decade, technical education in universities has experienced a reformulation brought by innovative methodologies, which in most cases are recognized as the present model for todays’ education
Focusing on areas related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and more to engineering, the trend heads towards new communication strategies [1,2] sustained by a common framework of ICT resources
The call regulations postulated the granting of funds to proposals which promoted and faced the objectives and challenges stated by the New Media Consortium (NMC) in the Educase Learning Initiative (ELI), both included by the recent Horizon report in higher education [44]
Summary
Technical education in universities has experienced a reformulation brought by innovative methodologies, which in most cases are recognized as the present model for todays’ education. Focusing on areas related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and more to engineering, the trend heads towards new communication strategies [1,2] sustained by a common framework of ICT resources This fact fosters the integration of blended and fully online methodologies, which again, demonstrate promising results in a wide range of scenarios [3,4,5,6]. The main goal usually seeks to assess active and valid learning. This comes implicitly associated with a set of secondary objectives which are strongly connected to the need of overcoming generalized misconceptions and wrong pre-acquired understanding of basic theoretic concepts [7,8,9,10] (most of them are even experienced by teachers [11]).
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