Students experience of blended teaching formats in pre-calculus courses

This work aims to investigate the difference (if any) between two blended teaching formats in a pre-calculus course for undergraduate engineering students. In 2022 students could choose among two settings for the preparatory course: a face-to-face and an online blended format, both based on a Pre-Calculus MOOC. At the very end of the course, we collected data from a survey to which 129 students answered. The analysis of the responses shows that the main differences between face-to-face and online blended formats concern intrinsic characteristics of the two settings. On the other hand, the data show that an accurate planning of the online format allows students' engagement even more than in face-to-face blended setting. Moreover, the findings shed a light on the potentiality of online learning in making the transition from high school to university smoother.