TO FLIP OR NOT TO FLIP

The flipped classroom is gaining popularity as a teaching strategy that allows instructors to create an active learning environment. It focuses the responsibility of learning on the students and changes their role from listeners to learners. In particular, it engages them in such higher-order thinking tasks as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation through doing things and thinking about the things they are doing. In the flipped classroom, instructors typically assign online recorded lectures as homework, and use face-to-face instruction for active learning exercises and direct engagement with students in the classroom.

In a study conducted by a group of faculty with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida and presented in the IEEE Transactions on Education, they reported significant gains in both student’s performance and retention rate after flipping Circuits I class.

This paper will present an example of a flipped-classroom approach to a one-semester “Fundamentals of Digital Design” required course for Electrical and Computer Engineering majors in order to lower its failure rate and to further motivate students so as to improve overall attrition.

The instructor used the LivescribeTM paper-based computing platform which consists of a digital pen, AnotoTM digital paper, software applications, and developer tools to create the online recorded lectures and problems which were uploaded to “Blackboard” for students to view and solve at home. The instructor used this technology as well as the concept of “Just-in-Time Teaching” (JiTT) to provide the “feedback loop” to affect what happens during the subsequent in-class time together.

Working with the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), we have been able to follow the development of flipped classes at both our own university and other institutions through CTL’s university partnerships.

As a result, despite the many ways to implement this model, this paper will describe the characteristics that the most successful flipped classrooms typically share. Additionally, through our own formative and summative assessment activities and a comparison with published findings based on data available via the university’s CTL, we will discuss the potential challenges that instructors who are flipping their class for the first time need to be aware of.

We believe that through the information from our own experience with flipping a class and the experiences of other instructors we can provide a valuable guide to instructors, who are considering to flip or not to flip, to make an informed decision.