Digital Learning Resources, Hybrid Teaching And Remote Students - Are Our Students Actively Engaged?

Abstract

At the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, a new cross-campus statistics course for approximately 1000 engineering students was planned for the fall of 2020. Due to the pandemic, digital learning resources were developed to allow students to work from home or campus, individually or collaboratively. These resources include short learning videos, automatically graded exercise sets, and Jupyter Notebooks for Python coding. Since 2020, digital learning resources have been essential for teaching statistics to engineering students across three campuses, and remotely. To help students navigate digital resources, on-campus activities, and assessments, each week of the semester was structured according to specific learning paths. However, asking the students to watch videos and work on exercises before on-campus or digital lectures is no guarantee that they will do so. For this study, we use video and assessment statistics, along with survey results, to determine to what extent the proposed learning paths were followed and the perceived usefulness of the various elements that make up a learning path. In surveys, the engineering students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology report great satisfaction with videos and digital assignments (along with scaffolding exercises) in the statistics course. By utilising digital user statistics, we observe patterns of engagement with digital resources that are closely tied to the proposed learning paths.