Innovative higher education teaching and learning techniques: Implementation trends and assessment approaches

Education plays an important and critical role globally in developing a skilled workforce. For many decades, the use of textbooks has been the traditional method of instruction; however, the emergence and implementation of teaching effectiveness assessment techniques has revealed that most students do not absorb the course content up to the expected level. As a result, many researchers have focused on advancing and improving the existing learning methods, as well as introducing and experimenting with new teaching styles. Unfortunately, researchers have been unable to agree on the effectiveness of the new teaching methods; consequently, they require further investigation. To address this problem, five innovative and effective teaching methods across all the engineering disciplines were selected (flipped classroom, gamification, design thinking/ case study, self-learning, and social media), and indepth content analyses of them were conducted. The advantages associated with each of the targeted new teaching method were explored, and data pertaining to teaching methods was identified and assessed. The results revealed that between the years of 2000 and 2017, the self-learning method and Social Media were researched and written about in journal articles significantly more often than other teaching methods. Most of the researchers distributed surveys/questionnaires to collect the data needed for the assessment of the adopted teaching techniques. It was concluded that adoption of Self-learning teaching method will improve research skills and thinking ability of learners. In addition, utilization of Social Media will increase effective communication among learners. The outcomes of this study have the potential to substantially help instructors, lecturers, and professors adopt the most effective teaching styles, based on their course learning objectives.