Blended Learning System for Further and Higher Education Mechanical Engineering Courses in Bahrain

Teaching and learning processes that are being followed globally by education providers consist of conventional face-to-face approach. Various socio-economic indicators have increased the pressure on Engineering Education in Bahrain in order to equip the students with both cognitive and psychomotor skills that are required by the labour market. The globalisation, along with the interdependence of various economies, has resulted in creating an extra dimension to the higher order of skills requirements. Hence, there is a need to develop new teaching and learning (T & L) methodologies that can comply with the ever increasing demands of the industry, regarding the skills of engineering students. In this study, the author has presented a comparison between various teaching and learning methodologies being implemented on the students of Higher National Diploma at Sheikh Khalifa Institute (SKI), Kingdom of Bahrain.

The author reviewed the effectiveness of the conventional teaching and learning methodology by comparing the pre-results with post-results. The same has been carried out on two novel T & L methodologies developed in these study i.e. computer-assisted instructions (CAI) and Blended Learning method, on imparting higher order of cognitive and psychomotor skills to engineering students. The study has been conducted on various groups of Higher National Diploma (HND) students at SKI. The study makes use of various questionnaires design especially for both the students and the teachers about their views on different T & L methodologies being implemented. It has been observed that computer-assisted instructions, when used with the conventional T & L methodology, perform superiorly than blended e-learning method or the conventional method alone. Hence, it has been recommended that this novel T & L method be used in the future to Higher National Diploma students at SKI.

Further to the development of a novel T & L methodology that performs better than the conventional T & L method, novel mathematical models have been developed for T & L methodology for both the cognitive and psychomotor domains. These mathematical models are based on the findings of the present study. These mathematical models explain the learning process of the students at microscopic level, in contrast to the conventional macroscopic evaluation method where only the marks obtained by the students indicate the quantitative learning. Furthermore, a novel Blended Learning package (containing tutorials for various Mechanical Engineering modules) has been developed based on the students-centred learning, considering institutional, pedagogical and technological contexts of service and product implementation. In this perspective, the novel Blended Learning package has been designed and developed in order to minimise/close the gaps between higher education at SKI and the requirements of the labour market.