Teaching electrical engineering to non-EE majors in a flipped or blended classroom

Abstract

We report the experience of teaching a large service course in Electrical Engineering (EE) for non-EE majors in a flipped, or blended classroom format, for five consecutive semesters during 2014 and 2015 (total, ∼650 students). In order to engage students in active learning outside the classroom we created a large number of online self-assessments; in the terms of Bloom's taxonomy, they belong to the lower levels of learning - remembering and understanding. During the lecture time, we engage students in activities focused on the higher levels of learning - applying, analyzing, and evaluating. Our main research tools include the official end-of-semester course evaluations, which included both standard (University-wide) questions and the questions specially designed for the assessment of our course. We also used the statistics of students' votes with clickers during the lectures. The results reveal positive attitude of students to the online self-assessments and to active learning during the lecture time. The students' feedback has guided some of the adjustments of our teaching/learning strategies and indicated the need for minilectures in the blended classroom.