Big academic open course: Thinking styles and approval percentages

Abstract

The growing demand for enrollment of undergraduate students in institutions of higher education (HEI) has generated the need for new modalities to carry out the teaching and learning process. The objective of this work identifies the relationship between thinking styles and approval rates in a group of students applying the BAOC (Big Academic Open Course) modality, school courses for large groups. BAOC is based on the b-learning and MOOC courses applied to school courses. Its greatest advantage is that it optimizes physical and human resources to serve a greater number of students, breaking the space-time paradigm. The methodology used includes the Numerical Methods in Engineering course, students' thinking styles are identified, work teams are formed based on their thinking style and their performance is analyzed during the quarter. Tests were performed for 3 years. The approval index in each quarter allows us to analyze the correlation between thinking style and approval rate. The results show that students with a predominant thinking style of “processes” obtained better grades. We can conclude that thinking styles are a determining factor for the formation of work teams in a course.