Flipped Electrical Engineering

Inexpensive circuit simulator ($3-4/mo)

"College-level online learning took off in a big way in 2012, and is likely to impact every department and teacher in some manner. This workshop will highlight major developments in online education technology in engineering and computer science. The workshop will highlight recent online trends like flipped classrooms and MOOCs, will survey various authoring and delivery platforms like EdX and Zyante, summarize some research on online/flipped teaching, discuss methods for instructors to collaborate on delivering instructional experiences, and highlight experiences by teachers of online and hybrid courses."

"We present a free and open source software for capturing and distributing video-lectures. At the conference the software is also being demonstrated." (It is called LODE)

"This work in progress compares two versions of a "classroom flip" instructional strategy in which lectures are moved from inside class to outside class. Class time is then spent on problem solving and feedback. In previous offerings of this materials science course, students were asked to read instructor-supplied lecture notes and complete an on-line warmup assignment prior to class. Informal cooperative learning activities such as think-pair-share were used during class, and clickers provided a mechanism for probing understanding and providing feedback. In the most recent offering, students viewed instructor-prepared multimedia microlectures and took an individual quiz as homework, then repeated the quiz and completed a problem set with an assigned team during class. Thus, the redesigned course delivered multimedia rather than text lectures, and utilized a structured team-based learning strategy rather than informal cooperative learning structures. Moreover, higher level "material selection challenges" were added to the redesigned course. This paper summarizes the planned assessment and evaluation methods to compare the two classroom flip models; results and analysis are not yet complete."

"This paper describes our initial effort to implement a flipped classroom approach to teach an Electric Circuits course. Prior to each scheduled class meeting, students are required to watch a recorded short lecture, which covers the topics in details and includes simple worked out problems. We have used Tablet PC in combination with PowerPoint, OneNote, and Camtasia as the capturing software, to produce the short-recorded lectures. We have also produced a set of narrated dynamically worked-out problems, with different difficulty levels that students are encouraged to watch. These recorded worked-out problems will complement the recorded lectures and help students with their problem solving skills. A typical lecture consists of a quick review of the concepts followed by solving more challenging problems, related to the lecture material. A more detailed discussion of this approach and the advantages and disadvantages of such a scheme are presented. The preliminary evaluations of the proposed approach by a group of students have been encouraging."

"This paper examines the use of social learning platforms in conjunction with the emergent pedagogy of the `flipped classroom'. In particular the attributes of the social learning platform "Edmodo" is considered alongside the changes in the way in which online learning environments are being implemented, especially within British education. Some observations are made regarding the use and usefulness of these platforms along with a consideration of the increasingly decentralized nature of education in the United Kingdom."

"Classroom Response Systems (CRS) have been shown to improve student learning outcomes by encouraging student engagement with the course content, instructors and student peers. The system's ability to provide immediate and quality feedback to both students and instructors, particularly in large classes, is highly desirable. While CRS has been used for well over a decade and been shown to successfully improve student engagement and participation, a number of studies have also identified that its use could potentially mean that less material is able to be covered in lectures. Clearly, the approach of cramming CRS into already content-heavy class time does not embrace the potential for CRS to improve student engagement and student learning. The use of CRS should be planned as an integral component of the course which enhances and reinforces the learning outcomes. The effectiveness of CRS depends strongly on the quality and variety of the questions, and the design of the activities to encourage students to engage with the questions. This case study explores the use of a new, low-cost, state-ofthe-art CRS (Top Hat Monocle) which allows students to use their mobile devices (phones, tablets, laptops) to respond to a variety of numerical, multiple-choice, short-answer and open-ended discussion questions posed during face-to-face workshops. In order to allow sufficient time to fully engage with the workshop activities traditional lectures were revised and the classroom lecture was flipped. Students worked through narrated lecture material (hand-e-lectures) online, prior to attending the workshops. CRS was included as part of the e-lecture content and feedback from this was incorporated into the workshops. Workshops extended the e-lecture content by including a variety of carefully designed, engaging activities (many were group activities) that used CRS questions to facilitate discussions, problem solving and case study analysis to enhance student cognition. Overall, the new-

"An alternative to the traditional classroom structure that has seen increased use in higher education is the flipped classroom. Flipping the classroom switches when assignments (e.g. homework) and knowledge transfer (e.g. lecture) occur. Flipped classrooms are getting popular in secondary and post-secondary teaching institutions as evidenced by the marked increase in the study, use, and application of the flipped pedagogy as it applies to learning and retention. The majority of the courses that have undergone this change use applied learning strategies and include a significant "learning-by-doing" component. The research in this area is skewed towards such courses and in general there are many considerations that educators ought to account for if they were to move to this form of teaching. Introductory courses in computer programming can appear to have all the elements needed to move to a flipped environment; however, initial observations from our research identify possible pitfalls with the assumption. In this work in progress the authors discuss early results and observations of implementing a flipped classroom to teach an introductory programming course (CS1) to engineering, engineering technology, and software engineering undergraduates."

"This paper outlines an ongoing study of the flipped classroom with second and third-year undergraduate engineering students in a numerical methods course. The flipped classroom is a new pedagogical method, which employs asynchronous video lectures and practice problems as homework, and active, group-based problem-solving activities in the classroom. It represents the combination of learning theories once thought to be incompatible-active, problem-based learning activities founded upon constructivist ideals and instructional lectures derived from direct instruction methods founded upon behaviorist principles. Using a controlled quasi-experimental research design, we conduct a study with a full 15-week numerical methods course at Utah State University during the spring semester of 2013. Students in the experimental section completed model-eliciting activities inside the classroom and video lectures and homework outside the classroom. Students in the control section completed homework outside the classroom and group lectures inside the classroom. The two groups will be compared using scores from homework, examinations, and a sixteen-question numerical methods conceptual pre- post- test pair. The three main features that distinguish this study from previous research are: 1) This is a controlled study; 2) This study examines student performance on objective measures; 3) This study uses model-eliciting activities in the experimental classroom."

abstract "The conventional approach to university education, prevalent for hundreds of years, involves a lecture by the professor during the scheduled class period and students working on exercises outside of class. Flipping a classroom refers to reversing the traditional role of in- and out-of-class activities. This instructional approach is sometimes also called inverting a classroom. In a flipped paradigm, the students are introduced to topics and basic concepts using video lectures or other means during their time outside of the classroom and spend the scheduled class period working on exercises under the supervision of the instructor. Instead of being a "sage on the stage" the instructor now becomes a "guide on the side" [1]. The conventional paradigm treats the student as an empty container into which knowledge is poured, while the flipped paradigm treats the student as an active learner who reconstructs knowledge from information. The flipped classroom began to receive increasing attention in the early 2000s (e.g., [2] and [3]) and has become much more accessible to instructors recently with the advent of low-cost screencasting software, e.g., [4], and Web-based course and video management tools. My institution, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), recently opened a new teaching facility in 2011 called WisCEL [5] that is specifically designed for interactive, student-centered approaches to teaching and is perfectly suited for the flipped classroom format."

Abstract: An inverted, or flipped, classroom, where content delivery includes video lectures watched outside of the classroom, is a method that can free classroom time for learner-centered activities such as active and problem-based learning. This study compared the effectiveness of an inverted classroom to a traditional classroom in three areas: 1) content coverage; 2) student performance on traditional quizzes and exam problems; and 3) student observations and perception of the inverted classroom format. A control-treatment experiment comparing an inverted classroom to a traditional lecture-style format was used. The results show that: 1) the inverted classroom allowed the instructor to cover more material; 2) students participating in the inverted classroom performed as well or better on comparable quiz and exam questions and on open-ended design problems; and 3) while students initially struggled with the new format, they adapted quickly and found the inverted classroom format to be satisfactory and effective.

Evan Lemley, University of Central Oklahoma, ASEE 2013