Flipped classroom experiences built on personal instrumentation

Abstract

The instructional practice of flipped classrooms is being investigated where specific content is provided via online video lectures, and class time is devoted to hands-on practice of concepts. There are two courses involved in this study. The first - Electronic Instrumentation (the main electronics course taken by student outside of Electrical and Computer Engineering) - was transitioned to flipped instruction in 2010 using the Mobile Studio as student-owned personal instrumentation. The flipped environment evolved with basically the same instrumentation toolset through the Fall of 2013, after which Analog Discovery became the platform of choice and course development continued through the Spring of 2015. During this period in which a single instructor developed and delivered the course, student and faculty perceptions of the use of online video lectures and the in-class active experiential learning (i.e., how both methods were used, their impact on student affect and cognition, as well as facilitators and barriers) and documentation of the process of continual development used to refine the implementation of the flipped classroom approach, were documented in a series of papers and book chapters. Although many students have some prior experience with video lectures, their comfort levels have not been consistently. A major focus of this development effort has been to provide students with scaffolding infrastructure so they can become more confident and successful in this learning environment. In the last year of this period, students demonstrated an acceptance in learning via the flipped classroom approach. The majority of students indicated they would not change anything about the group learning process in the flipped classroom. Students noted limitations to learning; individual learning characteristics appeared to have an effect on student perceptions of learning in a flipped classroom. With the general success of the flipped approach and the availability of new, higher performance personal instrumentation, we transitioned all course activities to new hardware and software while also enhancing the personal interaction between students, teaching assistants and the instructor to address, as much as possible, how each student could best raise their level of expertise in electronics. A major evolutionary event in Electronic Instrumentation occurred in Fall 2015 when it was taken over by a new instructor. The second course is an entirely new first year Introduction to ECE Analysis, first offered also in the Fall of 2015. Lessons learned in Electronic Instrumentation and even significant content have had a strong impact on this new course. This paper will address the impact of these changes measured through student surveys, performance on class assignments and examinations and, in the case of Electronic Instrumentation, feedback from the new instructor. The new first year course, while superficially similar in topics covered to Electronic Instrumentation, is a very different course. First, because there are no formal college level prerequisites (only a typical high school science and math experience is assumed), circuit analysis emphasizes algebraic methods and preparation for future circuits and electronics courses. An even more important distinction is the emphasis on a more complete and integrated Experimental Centric Pedagogy (ECP) than has been the case in Electronic Instrumentation (EI). Essentially every concept is first introduced through an experiment (experiment first) which requires that a substantial fraction of time spent in and out of class is dedicated to enhancing the students skills as electronics experimenters. A new outcome for EI and also included in the new course is that students will be able to identify online circuit designs that are relevant to their design projects (in these and other courses) and be able to effectively modify the designs to meet the specific needs of their projects. This concept has been under limited development in EI.