2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

With advances in technologies and ideologies, online learning has gained in popularity and acceptance among students. This has encouraged instructors to adopt flipped instruction in their classes. The flipped classroom is a relatively new pedagogical method that is based on video lectures and practice problems outside of class and active group-based activities during class. Video lectures enable the students to watch lectures at their own pace as many times as they wish. It also allows them to prepare for the upcoming lesson. Even more, video lectures allow students to identify the most challenging parts of the topic under study and encourage them to come up with questions to ask during class time. During the lecture time, students can get answers to their specific questions and get involved in group-based discussions and problem-solving. These in-class activities foster learning by students. The flipped classroom may seem risky as it put the responsibility on the student to finish video lectures before class time. However, some techniques, e.g., reliability quizzes, can be adopted to make sure that students complete the video lectures before the class. Also, some previous research suggests that student learning is improved in the flipped compared to the traditional classroom.

Due to their nature, ECE laboratory courses are well suited for flipping. This research studies students’ performance in two partially flipped ECE lab courses - signal processing and electronic circuit design. The study uses the data collected from the two courses over the period from summer 2018 to summer 2019. The primary motivation for the instructor to flip these classes was the desire of tailoring class time to students’ needs, questions, and experimentation. Both courses are composed of equally challenging modules, and the amount of flipped material varied from one semester to another, as driven by student feedback and needs. The instructor created custom videos for each of the flipped lectures, which were filmed at the university media lab. In this paper, we analyze scores from homework assignments, quizzes, and lab reports to assess the performance of the students with the flipped modules versus with traditional lecture modules within the same partially-flipped course. Lab report quality is an essential factor that can indicate how well the students learned the topics of the module as well as their ability to interpret and analyze the results of the experiments. Also, we will compare students’ scores from course sections that included some flipped instruction to other sections of the same courses without any flipped instruction. Student surveys and interviews were conducted to measure perceptions of flipped learning, and these will be content-analyzed by two analysts to determine students’ perception and reception of this technique.