How Effective was the Selected Teaching Strategy?

It has been interesting watching the progress of my students after I used the different teaching strategies.

 

With Direct Instruction, the students seemed to feel very comfortable with this format. This took me by surprise to a certain extent but it seems to have been popular for 2 reasons.  Firstly, they are quite familiar with this format from the school and other education, so possibly are within their own educational comfort zone.  Secondly, as long as I am telling them what they have to do and how they have to do it, they do not seem to have such a fear of failure (or more truthfully making themselves feel or appear foolish).  This has reinforced to me the need to be aware of the students own educational experiences and expectations when planning learning materials.  The majority of students who compelted the survey stated they felt much more comfortable about using the online format because of the DI session that took place

 

On collaboration, the strategy does not seem to have been fully successful.  The students never seemed interested in contributing to the work of others or giving and receiving feedback.  Again, this may be largely due to their previous experiences.  During an end of course survey I asked them about this point and although the majority agreed that they enjoyed the format they did not feel that this would help them to prepare for an individually graded timed exam. However, I feel that in future, if I build this in to the structure of the course at the outset, it will have much greater success