Blended Learning Blog #11: Prof. Delporte Explains How He Rose His Students’ Grades By 10% With Wooclap !

Cédric Delporte, Pierre Van Antwerpen and Ana?lle Vanden Dael (ULB), made a study on the reverse class and podcasts to promote individualized learning as part of a heterogeneous scientific course.

This manuscript describes the organisation of flipped classrooms and creation of pedagogic tools (podcast, virtual platform, quiz) in the context of a scientific lecture attended by students from different faculties and different levels.

First of all, let us mention the fact that flipped classrooms, that were given to students turned out to be innovative for them and the teachers who discovered this new pedagogical approach. This experience was thus, very fruitful. It has allowed the teachers to solve problems encountered during traditional teaching approaches.

Moreover, it illustrated the interest of students to attend other lectures organized with the same model. In general, the evaluation of this system showed encouraging and promising results.

This article also explains the case study of the interactive platform Wooclap and the results of using such type of tool in the case of a flipped classroom.

The context

The context of this study is to understand firstly, why in general, we are changing the traditional way of teaching?

Today, people face different limits regarding the traditional way of teaching. First of all there is the issue of limited hours to see the whole course content, lack of meaning (difficult access to equipment) and lack of motivation among students leading to a lack of presence of students in class and student satisfaction.

Then the question asked was, why would the teachers choose the reverse class system?

1. Finding students’ motivation
2. Structuring the personal work of students
3. Leveraging existing tools at Université Libre de Bruxelles

How did the analysts implement the concept of reverse class systems in their way of teaching and how are they going to measure the impact?

Framework and structure

Before 2015, the old method of teaching was through ex-cathedra lessons. The students then had to practice through exercises at home and were assessed on the content learned, during exams sessions at the end of a specific period.

Around 2015–16, the teachers decided to use a new method of teaching, via blended learning. With this method, the course content was given to the students through articles and videos that they prepared at home and exercises done during the class via the collaborative tech solution; Wooclap.

What came out from this first experience with this new method, was the fact that while using 40 to 50 questions per classes, the teachers didn’t take the time to give any explanations on the questions. There were too many questions leading to a lack of participation coming from the students leading itself to a lack of understanding appearing increasingly across time. This lead to showing that the use of blended learning in an inefficient way would lead to the same results as the traditional method of teaching.

From 2016 to 2017, the teachers decided to use the blended learning method as seen above, by putting the course content online at the disposition of the students. However, the difference laid in the fact that in class, they only limited the questions to 10 and on the thematics having caused the most difficulties. In a first time, the teacher asked the students to take a test after reading an article or watching a video at home and in a second time, they then took the time to explain in more details some concepts and to checkthe knowledge / understanding of the students with the classroom response system, Wooclap.

Indeed, there is no use in trying to review all the concepts with the audience, it’s time consuming and irrelevant. Analysing the effect of the use of such method, has led to show a sharp increase of students performances on the short term and long term. Indeed, results rose from 11/20 with old method to 13/20 with new method in the short term and the memory performances seemed to increase as well on the longer term thanks to the new teaching method. In addition, students’ satisfaction and attendance over a short and longer period increased as well.

Conclusion

As a matter of conclusion, it can be seen that with blended learning, an improvement is done in the efficiency of learning and teaching. Both students and teachers benefit from applying this new educational method. What matters is to optimize the use of blended learning, and thanks to the study made by these teachers, it is understood how to use this educational method to its best.

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