Flipped Classes: Do Instructors Need To Reinvent the Wheel When It Comes To Course Content?

At universities across the country, flipped classrooms are replacing traditional lectures for many fundamental engineering courses. Flipped classes often use short, lecture-style videos that students view before coming to class. Conventional wisdom in creating these videos says that it is better for the video to be of the actual course instructor rather than a video of someone else. The ubiquity of engineering statics courses across the country would therefore require many faculty at many institutions to make videos of the same material. In this study, faculty from North Carolina State University and Florida Institute of Technology have partnered to test the hypothesis that familiarity with the presenter in the video is optimal for student learning. Engineering Statics courses at NC State have been flipped for several years. The videos produced at NC State have been used in a newly flipped classroom at Florida Tech. For two modules, new videos of identical content were produced featuring the instructor of the newly flipped class. The first group of students saw the NC State videos for all but Module One, wherein they viewed the local professor's videos. The second group of students saw the Florida Tech videos for all but Module Two. To determine if there were differences in performance between students who viewed course videos by the local professor and students who viewed the non-local professor, scores on various assessment tools were analyzed using the ANOVA procedure. This study did not find a significant difference in academic performance between students who viewed videos featuring their classroom professor and students who were instead exposed to a non-local professor. Additionally, an end of course survey revealed that in general students had no preference for who was featured in the videos. Further refinement of the class materials management system and the inclusion of additional course modules are opportunities to improve and further validate this study. Section 1: Introduction Over the last several decades, more and more U. S. students are enrolling in college, with nearly forty percent of Americans obtaining at least a two-year college degree. The United States has long been the leader in higher education, boasting a majority of the top universities and colleges in the world. As the economy moves away from an industrial base, access to higher education is more and more necessary for economic success, and increasing numbers of Americans are seeking degrees. Increased enrollment has led to larger class sizes and more competition for jobs requiring college degrees. A college degree has shifted from being an advantage to a requirement, but not all students are equally prepared for college studies. Larger class sizes and increased span of student knowledge have strained the traditional classroom-based lecture model used by most universities. These issues, along with advances in technologies and communications, have led many faculty, departments, even entire institutions to challenge traditional teaching techniques. Alternative teaching methods including flipped classes, online courses, massive open online courses (MOOC), and hybrid online/classroom-based courses have emerged. Each of these redesigns consumes considerable time and effort, and success varies based on differences in course topics and execution. A flipped or inverted course design requires students to watch videos, read materials, or complete basic assignments outside of the traditional lecture setting. Starting to flip a course requires producing all of these out-of-class assignments or videos. One way to ease the implementation of a new teaching method is to partner or collaborate with other faculty, departments, or institutions that have already produced materials. This is an especially useful technique for courses that cover standardized topics such as engineering mechanics courses (statics, dynamics, fluids, etc.) as there is little-to-no variation in what material is taught; even the textbooks are very similar. This paper describes a collaborative effort to use a flipped class model for an “Engineering Mechanics: Statics” course taught at North Carolina State University (NC State) and Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech), one with significant flipped class experience and the other new to the flipped class model. Section 2 covers a review of previous literature. Section 3 describes the methodologies used in this study. Discussions of the study’s results are included in Section 4, with conclusions being presented in Section 5. Section 2: Literature Review Any good course redesign must start with an understanding of how students learn. Higher education strives to incorporate more and more active learning and increased student-faculty interaction, because research shows increases in student understanding and retention due to these course features. The same technology that has transformed the world in the last decades is also changing classrooms. Technology has facilitated flipping the engineering classroom, freeing up class time to work problems, do experiments, answer questions, etc. Providing lecture content outside of class provides more time during class to engage the students, to allow them to work together, to increase student-faculty interaction, etc. The idea of inverting the classroom has been used in many disciplines including engineering. Flipping the classroom shares many of the same ideas as the Scale-Up model of classroom redesign which was pioneered for physics and have also shown increased learning in biology, computer science, and math . But a poorly-designed flipped classroom can actually negatively impact student grades. The concept is simple: show the lecture outside of class and do something more active during class. But do those videos need to be remade every time? As Salmon Khan said, “If Isaac Newton had done videos on calculus, I wouldn’t have to ... assuming he was good.” 19 The use of publicly available third-party videos is common in K-12 education. The Khan Academy has built an international presence on the principle that a good video will suffice no matter who built it. MIT’s Open Courseware was initially predicated on the idea that it was best in higher education to have the expert provide the lecture. Indeed, the majority of views of MIT's videos are from outside of the country. However, little adoption of open educational courseware seems to have occurred thus far. One major obstacle that has been shown to exist is a difficulty in identifying appropriate and high quality materials . Another explanation may be issues related to material ownership raised by individual faculty, departments, or even institutions. Because of these issues, the first step in flipping a classroom isn’t using someone else’s videos but making instructor-specific videos to seamlessly merge with current curriculum. Large course redesign, especially as championed by the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), is very focused on helping faculty develop their courses for their own universities. Collaborations between one university and another, even for courses which are very similar, are less common. The American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Virtual Communities of Practice was formed in part to assist in such collaborations and was where this project began. Section 3: Methodology The flipped class format can be used as a more engaging and effective teaching method; however, flipped classes typically require a large amount of materials to be developed. These materials can require a significant upfront time commitment, which can be a barrier for adoption. This can be especially true for a faculty member that has spent years developing a traditional lecture style course. Dr. Anna Howard at NC State has several years experience teaching a flipped statics course. Through some trial and error, best practices were identified for the types of materials to use, including: short three to five minute videos summarizing the lectures key topics, pencast videos of example problems, skeleton course notes for students to complete on their own, and a website encompassing all of the course materials. Based on feedback received from students in previous years, the short lecture videos were identified as the best and most widely used materials to learn course content. Dr. Matthew Jensen has a single year of experience teaching engineering statics as a traditional lecture style course. After participating in the ASEE virtual community previously mentioned, the author decided to explore using a flipped course model, leveraging experiences from colleagues at other institutions. For the Fall 2014 semester, a class of 66 students participated in this study during their Engineering Statics course. Six students dropped the course during the semester, leaving a total of 60 students fully participating in this study. Data from the six students who dropped were not included in analysis. Dr. Jensen primarily utilized short lecture videos created by Dr. Howard, supplemented by PowerPoint summary slides created and used by Dr. Jensen in a previous engineering statics course. This study examined the effects on student learning by using both videos created by and featuring a faculty member from a different institution and videos featuring the Florida Tech professor. For two chapters (approximately 25% of the course material), videos were created by Dr. Jensen to be as similar as possible to Dr. Howard’s videos. The chosen chapters were Chapter 5: Equilibrium of a Rigid Body and Chapter 6: Structural Analysis. Those two chapters were covered over a four-week time period (seven lectures) followed immediately by a midterm i A video capture of handwritten notes exam covering only those two chapters. The 60 students were divided into two groups with similar demographics (sex, GPA, domestic versus international, etc.; see Table 1). Student Group A watched Dr. Howard’s videos for Chapter 5 and Dr. Jensen’s videos for Chapter 6. Student Group B watched the opposite combination of presenters so as to compare student performance on homework, quiz, and exam questions related to each chapter’s material. Table 1: Student Demographics Group Avg GPA Sex Visa Major Ch. 5 Videos Ch. 6 Videos M / F U.S./ Int. ME / AE / Other A 3.09 / 4.0 25 / 7 23 / 9 13 / 10 / 9 Author A Author B B 3.08 / 4.0 24 / 4 21 / 7 12 / 9 / 7 Author B Author A The course in this study used several software tools to deliver course materials. All course videos were uploaded to YouTube to allow students to view the videos at anytime on the platform of their choosing. All course content and out-of-class interactions between students and the instructor occurred using the Canvas course management tool. In Canvas, videos and PowerPoint materials were organized by week for students to view at their leisure. Canvas does track some information regarding how and when students login to view materials; however, this information is limited and did not allow for accurate tracking of student video views. Students’ materials were clearly separated by group. Although it was technically possible for students to view the videos intended for the other group, the instructor believes it is unlikely that students did so. In addition to Canvas, in-class quiz questions were administered using a classroom response system, TopHat. Quiz questions were asked at the beginning of each lecture and were used to evaluate student preparedness for course topics that were to be covered on that particular day. Exam, quiz, and homework questions were used to compare student performance between the two student groups. A total of nine exam questions related to the two chosen chapters were asked, five from a midterm exam and four from the final exam. A single quiz and homework assignment were associated with each chapter. Students were allowed to work collaboratively on homework, but quizzes and exams were completed independently. In addition to student performance, a survey was administered at the end of the semester to gauge student preferences related to the flipped class format, course materials, and overall course experience.