The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions of students in an implementation of &ldquo / Learning by Design&rdquo / method through a web based learning environment. The information gathered from the students enrolled in the undergraduate course / &ldquo / Foundations of Distance Education&rdquo / in 2009 Summer School and 2009-2010 Fall Semesters was evaluated.
The course was given in blended form, i.e. face to face lessons and online instructional activities were performed together. In the web based part of the course, several educational modules of an open source learning management system (LMS), such as quizzes, forums, lesson pages, wiki pages, mail interface etc. were used. The students were responsible for implementing an educational course site on the LMS platform, using the course curriculum applications.
Within the scope of this thesis, the perceptions of the students about course-related projects, and online and classroom activities were investigated through interviews and questionnaires. The academic development of students was also considered in the study. Additionally, several informal interviews were also done with the instructor of the course in order to investigate his perceptions about the conduct of the course. Questionnaire results have been analyzed quantitatively and face to face interview results have been analyzed qualitatively.
Both quantitative and qualitative data indicated that the students&rsquo / perceptions about how the course was conducted and the learning by design activities were generally positive. Especially the project work, which was assigned as a requisite of the learning by design method, was pointed out as a positive factor in students' / learning of the subject matter both in the questionnaires and in the face to face interviews. Another important finding of the interview and questionnaire results was that the communication between the instructor and the students contributed positively to not only learning the course content but the quality of the projects as well. As an outcome of this study, many important factors, which lead to successful results in implementation of learning by design method in a web based environment, have been identified. These results are presented in detail in the ' / Discussion and Recommendations' / section.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:METU/oai:etd.lib.metu.edu.tr:http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12611781/index.pdf |
| Date | 01 May 2010 |
| Creators | Akman, Evrim |
| Contributors | Akman, Evrim |
| Publisher | METU |
| Source Sets | Middle East Technical Univ. |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | M.S. Thesis |
| Format | text/pdf |
| Rights | To liberate the content for public access |
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