Comparative Analysis of Online and Blended Online Learning

Abstract

Students interaction in the online classroom with instructor is an important consideration in ensuring that students can improve their knowledge and reach a higher level of achievement in engineering courses. This study focuses on fostering student's interaction and improves learning for a course digital image processing offered in a private institution of higher education (HITAM) in Telangana, India. Interactive features includes most important synchronous discussions and polls in scheduled sessions, and which can be achieved via social media tools for sharing of information and resources. Qualitative student feedback was analysed regarding the new way of delivering the course. Findings indicated that students who attended weekly synchronous sessions valued online session as it give them more information about image visual than the traditional class. Problems identified included technical difficulties during synchronous sessions, absenteeism, participation was lacking on the questioning&discussion and inability to attend synchronous sessions due to scheduling of their individual class of interest like GRE etc. In addition, few students made use of the opportunity to interact via social media. While students expressed that the visual components of the course were valuable and helped them in qualifying the Assessments, several areas in which improvement may be made remain. This paper proposes blended online learning as one of the efficient method to improve learning. The analytical result from this study is shown, which is the comparison of online learning and blended online learning.