Strategies to Enhance Learning in a Large Engineering Economics Course: Including Students’ Perceived Values in the Instructional Redesign Process

Abstract

Purposeful implementation of technology in instructional design presents opportunities to increase institutional efficiency while simultaneously improving instructional quality. This paper presents findings from the implementation of a hybrid/buffet approach in an undergraduate Engineering Economics large course. A Design-Based Research (DBR) approach informed the instructional redesign and measured its effectiveness through multiple iterations, or macro-cycles, of implementation. Overall, pedagogical structure and specific technology solutions applied to each course component are described, as well as preliminary measures of effectiveness and student perception from a pilot offering of the hybrid/buffet course. Encouraged by positive preliminary results, a second implementation informed further study of students’ perceived usefulness, value, and overall impact on their learning of WileyPLUS online tools and their predictive power on students’ overall course performance. These two DBR macro-cycles created a baseline to analyze the impact of future strategies to improve student learning in this course.