An analysis of student perceptions and teacher intentions of blended learning in Computer and Instructional Technology Teacher Education Program

Abstract

One of the key concerns of teacher education is to facilitate the development of the teaching talents of pre-service teachers with scaling technologies and pedagogy of the 21st Century. Teacher educators also need to enhance pre-service teachers’ curriculum by modeling good teaching methods. This study explored another side of blended learning methods and tried to uncover students’ perceptions of what their instructors are practicing. Social relations that are created by blended learning methods are also explored. Instructors of Computer and Instructional Technology Teacher Education Department (CTE) and their respective students were participants in the study to investigate the departmental use of blended learning methods. Total of 44 students and 12 teachers participated in the study. Only students of preparatory school and freshmen are not included because of their lack of sufficient number of courses where blended v learning methods are used. Data collection tools in the research included interviews and questionnaires aimed to assess students’ perception of blended learning methods together with the interviews and questionnaires of the instructors of the CTE Department in order to understand what blended learning methods were practiced. The data collected from both interviews and questionnaires were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative techniques. The findings revealed that although 4th and 5th year students are aware of the different applications of blended learning and the intentions of teachers who used this approach, we cannot generalize and say the same for all CTE students. Yet another finding is that participants thought that Learning Management Systems (LMS) improve the student-to-student and teacher-to-student relations in instructional settings. Additionally, the majority of the students think that computer literacy affects the success of blended learning applications unlike the beliefs of instructors.