Blended instruction in a programming course: Lessons learned

Using a blended learning approach, a programming course in MATLAB is designed for students who already know another programming language. The blended components of the course include recorded short lectures, textbook and online reading, consulting sessions where students work with instructors, and both optional and required programming exercises. Students achieve mastery in MATLAB programming in a self-paced, auto-tutorial format where in-person interaction between instructors and students is encouraged. Time-flexibility is emphasized in the course design in order to give students control over the pacing of their learning. Being inserted into a student schedule that was otherwise based on a traditional course format, however, the flexibility of the auto-tutorial course led to withdrawal rates of around 50% in the early version of the course. The main problem was that students prioritized based on deadlines; therefore the flexibility of a self-paced course could not compete with the fixed deadlines of traditional courses. We learned three lessons: (1) Milestones need to be established early in the course. (2) Intervention that addresses a student´s weakness must be available and employed opportunely. (3) Incentives for student ownership of their work need to be built into the course through assessment and logistics.