At the University of Twente, all curricula are organised in thematic modules with a project and several courses that offer students knowledge and skills to integrate and apply to design a solution for the problem. A ‘just-too-late’ teaching model is applied, meaning that knowledge is offered to students a while after they encounter challenges and problems in the project, so they will first try to come up with their own solutions. For most courses this model is working well. For the math courses this is somewhat more difficult, partly because it is a general course offered to all engineering and science programmes at the same time. To create more flexibility in the timing of the math courses and to get students to engage in the subject matter earlier and more actively, a flipped classroom setting was designed. Instead of attending the general lectures, students were expected to prepare at home using a set of structured materials on Blackboard and bring their questions to the tutorial sessions. A weekly diagnostic test was offered to test progress, followed by a repair tutorial session. Approximately 100 students participated in the pilot setting. The pilot was evaluated by classroom observations, interviews with teaching staff and a survey set out three times during the course, including measurement of student motivation and expectations. Also, Blackboard an analysis of Blackboard log files was made. After the course, a panel discussion with students was held to elaborate on evaluation results. During the pilot, observations showed that it was very hard to get students engaged in interactive discussions. After the first weeks, participation during lectures and diagnostic tests dropped dramatically. The pass rate of the course was 66%, compared to 80% in previous years. Evaluation results showed that a substantial part of the students were not actively involved in the self-study activities from the beginning of the course and that active participation dropped further during the module. However, also some positive effects were reported of a smaller group of students engaging more actively with the subject matter and gaining better insight. A set of recommendations was made for improvement of the flipped classroom setup focussing on stimulating and retaining active involvement of students.
Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016