Flipped Lectures in Engineering Fundamentals

• EF 151 and EF 152 are large classes that all engineering students take
• Each class is 4 credit hours – (Three 50 minute large lectures; two 75 minute rectations, 24 students/recitation)
• Want to find alternatives to large lecture (400-500 students in large class, 100-200 in small class)
• Discussion/interaction still difficult with a large class
• Material is very quantitative
• Textbook – recommended. Reading assignments, not effective, lots of other online resources.
• Have had Mediasite (151, 152) recorded lectures available for years
• Used tag-team teaching and clickers for years
• Don’t want to add more work for students
  • Fall EF 151 students reported spending an average of 10.1 hours per week on homework
  • A common theme in ASEE papers on flipped classroom has been to “create time” for active learning.
  • Active learning already exists in EF courses through the recitation

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Flipped Lectures

• Started with Friday lectures
• Created an equivalent online lecture consisting of multiple videos embedded into an online homework.
• Two slightly different approaches to using the lecture time
  • EF 151
    • “Flex Fridays” – optional attendance
    • Give complete lecture
    • No clickers (or clickers don’t count)
    • All students have to answer video questions
    • Approximately 30% attendance
  • EF 152
    • “Fabulous Fridays” – optional attendance
    • Homework help/discussion or lecture summary + HW help
    • No clickers
    • All students have to answer video questions
    • Approximately 8% attendance
    • Spring, 2014 class primarily made up of Fall, 2014 EF 151 students

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Online Lecture

• Videos embedded into an online homework (Demo requires UTK NetID login)
• Each video 5-10 minutes (approximately 1 video per slide)
• Videos made with Screencast-o-matic (PC/Tablet) or with Doceri (PC/iPad)
• Hosted on dedicated class web server
• Formatted to work with phone/tablet/computer
• One or two ‘simple’ questions per video
• Some educational research has suggested looking at questions first to help organize your thoughts
• After initial learning curve creation time is approximately 4 hours/lecture
• Harder to change topics/sequence/schedule
• A small mistake in the video is hard to fix

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Evaluation

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Conclusions

• Courses already had many aspects of a flipped lecture, so the real question is what is the best way to present the material.
• With many learning styles, there is no easy answer.
• First-year students seemed to struggle the most with time management/discipline to watch the video. However, these are valuable things for first-year students to learn.
• Just having Friday different may not be the most effective. Other options? All video lectures and 3 recitations per week? Smaller live lectures w/ recitations?