Designing blended engineering courses

Universities have to deal with larger differences of engagement between students and more need for outcomes-based teaching and learning that allows for differences in learning styles. In addition for engineers, the rapidly changing world brings the need to engage students in diverse learning.

Wageningen University & Research is experiencing these trends. It tackles them with outcomes-based teaching and engaging students within a rich setting of blended learning. The resulting education programmes are rated as the best in the national surveys of the last twelve years.

This paper describes how to design such blended learning courses based on literature. It also reflects the experience of Wageningen University & Research with its successful approach.

The prerequisites for course design are a well-constructed curriculum and properly formulated Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs). The core of course design consists of selecting and combining different types of online and on-campus Teaching and Learning Activity’s (TLAs). Generally a smart design of a combination of (many) types of TLAs is needed to create top-quality blended engineering courses. Student motivation and higher level Intended Learning Outcomes for engineering require rich on-campus TLAs that cannot be completely offered online.