2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Flipping course lectures using online videos has demonstrated mixed results in various contexts (e.g., in different courses, with or without post-assessments, in tandem with reading guides). This work will describe the initial results of flipping the content lectures (ca. 15 in total) in an Introduction to Thermodynamics course, with mostly first and second year Chemical Engineering undergraduates.
The videos were produced by re-apportioning and recording the PowerPoint lectures (developed in the previous year) which covered theoretical concepts and principles only—PowerPoints which covered example problems were reserved for class time. The video lectures were scripted and then recorded at the maximum (talking) speed at which the instructor was comfortable, thereby ensuring that a majority of the videos are less than 10 minutes in duration, and none are longer than 15 minutes. Videos took approximately 2-3 hours to produce, including scripting, recording, and editing (plus roughly one hour to compile and upload to the LMS). Student learning is encouraged using short, ungraded online quizzes (available for most of the videos) for which they receive participation points. In addition to the videos, students are provided regular reading guides and reading quizzes (developed by the instructor of a separate section of this course).
Students are anonymously surveyed via the LMS at the end of the course as to their use of the videos (self-reporting is compared to LMS access data), their opinion of the format of the videos (length, speed, quality), and their opinion of the content and usefulness of the videos, in addition to open comments. Student performance (as measured by exam and final grades) is compared against students’ self-reported use of the videos by means of swarm plots, revealing correlations between performance and video use. In addition, quantitative results and frequent comments from the video survey (and those made about the videos during mid-term and final course evaluation surveys) will be included in the analysis.
Initial results (from early submissions to the mid-term evaluation survey) suggest the videos are highly appreciated by and useful to the students, but too fast and perhaps too long for some students. Although it is too early to tell with certainty, the introduction of these videos does not appear to have had a strongly negative effect on student performance. Nevertheless, the material presented in the videos (roughly two hours in total) is done in a far more time-efficient manner (sparing roughly seven hours of in-class time over the entire semester). While the initial time investment is significant (ca. 2-3 hours for every hour lecture, presented in 10-15 min), the same videos may be re-used as-is, or with minor modifications, in future years. This affords the instructor more flexibility to introduce (potentially time-consuming) active learning techniques during class time, and to experiment with other didactic interventions.