Comparison of the effect of lecture and blended teaching methods on students’ learning and satisfaction

Introduction: blended learning, a new approach in educational planning, isdefined as an applying more than one method, strategy, technique or mediain education. todays, due to the development of infrastructure of internetnetworks and the access of most of the students, the internet can be utilizedalong with traditional and conventional methods of training. the aim of thisstudy was to compare the students’ learning and satisfaction in combination oflecture and e-learning with conventional lecture methods.methods: this quasi-experimental study is conducted among the sophomorestudents of public health school, tehran university of medical science in 2012-2013. four classes of the school are randomly selected and are divided intotwo groups. education in two classes (45 students) was in the form of lecturemethod and in the other two classes (48 students) was blended method withe-learning and lecture methods. the students’ knowledge about tuberculosis intwo groups was collected and measured by using pre and post-test. this step hasbeen done by sending self-reported electronic questionnaires to the students'email addresses through google document software. at the end of educationalprograms, students' satisfaction and comments about two methods were alsocollected by questionnaires. statistical tests such as descriptive methods, pairedt-test, independent t-test and anova were done through the spss 14 software,and p?0.05 was considered as significant difference.results: the mean scores of the lecture and blended groups were 13.18±1.37and 13.35±1.36, respectively; the difference between the pre-test scores ofthe two groups was not statistically significant (p=0.535). knowledge scoresincreased in both groups after training, and the mean and standard deviationof knowledge scores of the lectures and combined groups were 16.51±0.69and 16.18±1.06, respectively. the difference between the post-test scores of thetwo groups was not statistically significant (p=0.112). students’ satisfaction inblended learning method was higher than lecture method.conclusion: the results revealed that the blended method is effective inincreasing the students' learning rate. e-learning can be used to teach somecourses and might be considered as economic aspects. since in universities ofmedical sciences in the country, the majority of students have access to theinternet and email address, using e-learning could be used as a supplement totraditional teaching methods or sometimes as educational alternative methodbecause this method of teaching increases the students’ knowledge, satisfactionand attention.