Developing the OBTL curriculum with blended learning to enhance student’s learning effectiveness

The study aims to develop an OBTL curriculum in Early Childhood Education (ECE) to demonstrate exemplary cases of effective teaching and learning in the undergraduate ECE programme. The project includes continuous assessment, group presentation, self-learning, and individual assignment to assess students’ learning outcomes. A self-learning system is setup in the e-learning for students to monitor their learning progress during the semester, including two on-line exercises and checklist of learning outcomes. The presentation was evaluated in self-evaluation, peer evaluation, and lecturer evaluation. A pre-post study, dual-scaling analysis, and focus group interviews were conducted to understand students’ learning effectiveness in the study, 78 year 3 full-time BEd (ECE) students (75 females, 3 males) and 92 (all females) BEd (ECE) students were invited to participate in the study. The CLEI (College Learning Effectiveness Inventory) was used to measure student learning effectiveness during the study. The result indicated that the more learning outcomes students achieved, the higher the score they got. This implies that the clear and well-stated learning outcomes can help student learn better. For the learning effectiveness, the academic self-efficacy has been significantly improved in the end of two courses. They showed higher order cognitive ability to reflect on past experiences, make personal choices based on management of time, goal, and priority setting. Copyright © 2011 The Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching – D.C.