Kandidat: Aamna Rais-Ahmed
Prosjekttittel: Exploring Blended Project-Based Learning in Undergraduate Computing Education: A Community of Inquiry Approach
Beskrivelse av prosjektet: Blended learning has become a common teaching method in higher education. Yet our understanding of what it actually requires socially and pedagogically remains underdeveloped, particularly in collaborative settings like project-based courses. Most existing research has focused on the student perspective and measured outcomes such as performance and satisfaction.
The conditions and processes that make those outcomes possible have received far less attention. This dissertation addresses that gap through an exploratory sequential mixed methods study of four interrelated investigations, unified by the Community of Inquiry framework and situated in undergraduate project-based computing education courses in Norway, Finland and Sweden.
A systematic literature review mapped how blended learning is defined, implemented and evaluated in project-based computing courses, revealing conceptual fragmentation across the field. A bibliometric analysis of 34 studies identified key research gaps including student-dominated samples, a predominance of quantitative methods, fragmented vocabulary, and limited multi-stakeholder research.
A qualitative study, drawing on interviews with 13 students, 3 teachers and 3 industry mentors, found that the same blended design produces structurally different experiences for each group. Finally, a cross-national survey of 232 students confirmed that social presence partially mediates the relationship between teaching presence and cognitive presence, most strongly in the exploration phase of inquiry and that hybrid blended models produce significantly higher social presence than flipped classroom models.
Veiledere: Førsteamanuensis Line Kolås, Nord universitet, forsker Gabrielle Hansen, NTNU, og førsteamanuensis Anna Marie Holand, Nord universitet
Opponenter: Professor Jessica Aspfors, Nord universitet, og forsker Fredrik Enoksson, KTH Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, Sverige
Tid og sted: 16.6.2026 kl. 12.00-15.00. Digitalt via Teams