Exploring factors for effective use of online information in SPOC within the engineering education

Abstract

Today's Small Private Online Course (SPOC) environments are mashing different services from public, private, or hybrid clouds, different equipment, different tools, platforms, and learning pedagogies. The aim of this paper is to provide designers, developers, and educators with insights for implementation and utilization of such complex and heterogeneous SPOC frameworks. Factors that impact effective use of online information of designed digital content for engineering courses and successfulness of such systems are examined using SPOC platform at university course. First outcome of this study is fact that learners have used and accepted SPOC platform positively, which is examined using questionnaire. Second, this study as a result identified following important drivers for SPOC platform successfulness: the high quality of information and useful learning contents, easy for use, and social presence support. These drivers lead to learners feel usefulness of the platform and to enjoy in using it. Study also shown that SPOC platform quality is strong related to learners’ perceptions with the system and perceived easy of use.

An online course mode based on microlecture videos: Using CAD geometric modeling course as an example

“…From Tables 1 and 2, it is observed that there are higher approval degrees for our online courses in the intensive undergraduate classes and the postgraduate class than for the regular undergraduate classes, which shows that the teaching materials are probably too difficult for regular undergraduate classes. Our results are consistent with Nejkovic's conclusion that SPOC platform quality is strong related to learners’ perceptions of the system and the perceived ease of use [23]. Consequently, we should design new teaching materials with a lower learning difficulty in the coming years for regular undergraduate classes (Table 3).…”

“…The statistical data in Table 2 is similar to questionnaire surveys in the existing literature [6,23]. According to the statistical data, the majority of suggestions, respectively 73%, 96%, and 89.5%, can accept our online course mode.…”

“…Our improvement involves the use of teacher‐led regulation and the real‐time learning evaluation. A similar result had been acquired by Clark and Kaw [6] who considered that “the flipped classroom with adaptive learning may be the best method.” Nejkovic and Tosic [23] also found that learners felt usefulness of the platform and enjoyed using it.…”

“…Existing online course approaches can be usually divided into four categories: (i) real‐time online live lectures [2,3,10,15,17]; (ii) microlecture videos [8,18–20,25,29–31]; (iii) SPOC [6,23,32,34]; and (iv) courses that blend SPOC and conventional classrooms [32]. One of these approaches solves one or several ones among these problems.…”

“…Consequently, SPOC is also called an efficient “flipped classroom.” Clark and Kaw's [6] investigations showed that a blended classroom mode which combined a conventional classroom and a flipped classroom is more effective than a solely conventional classroom. Nejkovic and Tosic [23] explored factors that affect the effectiveness of SPOC, including the information system dimension, the motivation for socialization, and users' intention control variables, which provides designers, developers, and educators with insights for implementation and utilization of SPOC. Zeng et al [32] constructed an online/offline blended teaching mode based on SPOC, which is composed of 101 microvideos addressing knowledge points for Principles of Chemical Engineering Course .…”