Teaching first-year engineering design using a flipped classroom model
A team of faculty at Rice University and other institutions has created instructional resources to support a flipped classroom model for first-year engineering design. Gone is the traditional 'class' in which faculty lecture on the design process and other professional skills. These 'lectures' are now delivered on video, essentially shifting low cognitive load work to videos that students watch outside of class. In class, students complete active learning exercises focused on the engineering design process. Afterwards, student teams also apply the engineering design process to their specific projects. The authors have created the following educational materials to flip the first-year multidisciplinary engineering design classroom: • Sixty web-based videos featuring student teams and faculty at Rice University as well as three other institutions that focus on steps of the engineering design process and professional skills. Topics include defining the problem, researching the design problem, framing design criteria, brainstorming solutions, selecting solutions with Pugh matrices, project planning using Gantt charts, prototyping, and testing. • Twenty-one online quizzes (with 10-25 questions each) that cover information discussed in the videos. Quizzes are multiple choice and true/false and test students' knowledge and application of the technical content in the videos. • Thirty in-class exercises that support active learning in the classroom. The in-class exercises typically require students to apply a specific step in the design process to a new problem, critique a completed design step, or synthesize knowledge. During the 2015-2016 academic year, all engineering design and professional skills lectures were flipped. The focus of this poster is to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate students' use of the videos, quizzes, and in-class exercises during the fall 2015 semester. Using analytics from YouTube and our course management software, we evaluated the percent of students who watched the videos, the number of students who started the videos, the average watch time, the percent of students who completed the quiz, and their grades. From this we learned that >80% of the students started the instructor videos, and that the number of student starts and average video watch time declined during a given playlist. Also, students performed well on quizzes, with an average score of 90%. These materials are available for others to use. The team is seeking feedback on developing materials that will be helpful for the academic community teaching engineering design.
