AN EXPERIMENT IN FLIPPED LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION. THE STUDY OF THE INFLUENCE OF FLIPPED LEARNING IN THE MOTIVATION OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Since the year 2000, the Flipped Learning scene has been growing in relevance and has been thoroughly researched in primary and secondary education levels. Only recently have these studies caught up with teaching in college and university. In higher education, research is scarce and still lacks the entity of that of lower levels.

Flipped Learning is the general name for a number of pedagogical techniques and methods that seek to turn the student into the agent of his own learning, putting him in the center of the learning process. Lecturing is removed from classrooms where learning is achieved through practice and collaborative activities. Lectures are to be covered by students outside the classroom through multimedia contents created or recommended by the teacher. The teacher’s role is now tilted towards that of a guide and coach during class time.

For two consecutive semesters in the year 2014 at the Universidad Europea de Madrid (UEM) an experiment in flipped classroom took place. During that time three groups of engineering students of the 100% English programs of computer engineering and mechanical engineering (a total of 85 students), studied the second course subject of statistics. Two of the groups had the second half of the subject flipped and the third group would serve as a control group to test the methodology.

Each group took the same tests on the same dates; the methodology was implemented after a midterm test and went on for a span of 6 weeks. Each group answered a survey before the implementation and after the final exam at the end of the course. They were asked to evaluate the perception of their self-learning and those groups were the methodology was implemented were also questioned about their inclinations towards it. A final test was passed by all three groups a month after the course was over to study the impact of the methodology in long term learning.

Multimedia content for the classes was created specifically by the authors of this article. Most of the lectures were videos hosted on youtube.com, extended and complemented by a number of more classic documents. All this was indexed and available on a moodle based Virtual Campus that students had full access to. The videos were all uploaded to a specific channel called Aula UE created for hosting teaching tutorials in 2013 by the authors under the UEM guidelines.

Inside the classroom, students were broken into groups of two or three. A number of proposed statistical problems would then have to be solved collaboratively and handed in by the end of the class by each group. Problems covered those areas proposed as topics for that day on the virtual campus. Group members could not be together in future sessions till they had cycled through the whole class, attenuating the influence of rigid group structures.

This paper’s intention is to thoroughly describe the way in which the methodology was implemented. It also seeks to statistically analyze the data recovered from the experiment and study the influence of the implementation of a flipped classroom methodology in the motivation of students and the number of potential dropouts from the course it prevents. The first gross study of numbers turned out that there were an average 10% less dropouts during the course in those groups where Flipped Learning was implemented. A more detailed study is described in the paper itself, were groups attendance and dropout levels are compared with those other subjects of the same year.