Post-Pandemic Student Reception of Flipped Classrooms in Civil Engineering Education

Abstract

Before the COVID-19 SARS-COV pandemic of 2020, significant momentum had occurred in the engineering education community for use of flipped classrooms. For engineering educators seeking to develop more time and space in the classroom for active learning activities, flipped classrooms are an attractive pedagogical tool. The concept of a flipped classroom is to provide students with a pre-class video viewing and pre-class reading assignment to prime them for in-class interactive learning experiences. The engineering education literature has many positive examples of flipped classrooms. In our curricula, flipped classrooms were used to positive effect in geotechnical engineering courses within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering for several years, with student learning outcomes and student opinion surveys used to document the effectiveness and reception of the flipped classroom format. However, the COVID-19 pandemic provided a 2-year change in student learning unprecedented in recent memory. Instruction for much of the undergraduate curricula went online to at least some extent during the pandemic. Although there was a range of virtual learning tools used to varying effect over the pandemic, with different approaches utilized by faculty, students found themselves in a virtual environment for an extended period. In the aftermath of the pandemic, engineering educators have observed a markedly changed student reception of the flipped classroom concept. Despite not changing the tools and techniques utilized in the same classes pre- and post-pandemic, student reception of the flipped classroom format has decreased. Data collected from flipped classrooms post-pandemic are compared in this paper to data collected pre-pandemic. The results of this comparison of student feedback and learning outcomes has shown that the effects of the pandemic induced virtual campus experience has changed the landscape, perhaps just temporarily, and that students' post-pandemic are overwhelmingly desirous of in-class instruction with no videos. They are tired of videos and online modules! They want to interact face-to-face. This paper helps provide a balanced examination of the times and seasons for effective use of the flipped classroom format.