Background
In 2013, a major university wide restructure of faculties at the University of Wollongong, saw the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Informatics merge to become the Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences. Within this new faculty, the formation of a common first year curriculum of eight prescribed subjects for the Engineering degree was proposed. Through consultation with key stakeholders from all engineering disciplines and existing teaching teams from both existing first year programs, five new engineering subjects were created, to coexist with unaltered physics and mathematics subjects. This paper will present the development and implementation of a flipped-classroom delivery for the new first year Computing and Analysis subject.
There has been much discussion in recent times as to the usefulness of what is called the traditional lecture. Lecture attendance continues to drop right across the spectrum of faculties and disciplines at a tertiary level for many reasons, including; part-time work, family/carers responsibilities and lack of engagement. The general assumption is that the lecture is where the students learn the course material; however, this is not necessarily the case, especially if the students are able to gain as much, or more, from other class types, such as tutorials and laboratories. This is one of the reasons for investigating alternatives to the traditional lecture; not just to try and increase attendance, but to also increase the active learning by students.
Purpose
The purpose of establishing the flipped-classroom in the computing subject, was to create an active learning environment for the students, where they could take ownership of their learning. This resulted in students undertaking a much more active role that they would otherwise encounter, or be prepared to engage in, in the ‘standard’ didactic lecture approach. For computer programming, students learn more effectively by doing, not by listening to an academic talk to them in a lecture setting. By flipping the classroom, some of the emphasis is placed back onto the students to prepare for the weekly lecture and computer laboratories ahead of time, rather than turning up for class being under-prepared.
This subject exposes the students to the active learning concept for the first time in their university life and by showing the benefit of this to other academics within the faculty, it is hoped that this lecture format and learning style can be applied to other subjects throughout the degree to enhance the overall learning experiences of the students.
Active learning is something which all students need to embrace, for success in the subjects they undertake, as well as for their lifelong learning once they reach the workforce. There are a number of stakeholders who will benefit from the successful implementation of the flipped-classroom, including current and future students of the subject as well as staff and subject coordinators of other engineering subjects who can adapt their deliveries and assessments in similar ways, when appropriate.
Approach
The flipped-classroom format was developed with one key question in mind, “How do we motivate the students to engage in the pre-lecture content?”. It is not as simple as uploading content and the students performing the work, especially for first year students. University students very quickly become assessment driven and when resources are available, it is generally only the high achieving students who will engage in this material, regardless of direct assessment implications. These students are generally not the ones who need to access the material, as they will succeed regardless. This led to summative assessment being attributed to these pre-lecture activities to ensure engagement by the students. To ensure weekly pre-lecture videos were reviewed, twelve weekly summative LMS quizzes were developed to encourage student engagement and to allow a more active role in the lecture each week. Additionally, students were exposed to four hours of practical and workshop computing each week where they completed exercises from the prescribed textbook and also undertook a range of problem-solving programming activities. Both the quizzes and classes had an assessment component, with the best 10 of 12 of each counting to students’ final assessment. Students not participating were contacted weekly to remind them of the summative nature of the assessments. The students also completed a group assignment, where they were provided with a ‘realistic’ engineering data set that they had to analyse using the programming skills and kinematics concepts they learnt during the subject. A final exam constituted the remainder of the assessment.
Discussion
Early in the first semester of the subject there were anecdotal comments from a cohort of students that the calculus component of the subject (including kinematics) was difficult owing to the fact that these students had studied a non-calculus level of mathematics in high school. Additional resources were provided to cater to these students to aid in their understanding, while they waited to cover this vital information in their enabling mathematics subject. Additionally, owing to the unforgiving nature of learning a programming language for the first time, students were also offered completely voluntary help sessions in both online and face-to-face formats. One set of analyses will be a top level investigation of the success of the students with known math deficiencies and their overall success in the subject. Another area of investigation will be the utilisation of the various online and class assessment components throughout the session, including engagement in all pre-lecture videos in preparation for the weekly activities, as well as the adoption and popularity of various voluntary help session formats. The uptake of these resources and activities will be compared to the results of the final exam to determine if there are any indicators to success, or lack thereof, for the subject as a whole.
Recommendations
Based on a range of feedback obtained from students, a review and possible adjustments may be made to the assessments for the next implementation of the subject in 2016. The findings, good or bad, will be useful in discussing the running of a flipped-classroom style subject for possible inclusion in other engineering subjects.
Several issues have been identified during the delivery of the subject in 2015, including; getting the right balance of active learning in the new lecture format, possible reorganisation of subject topics to better align with concepts being taught in parallel subjects (i.e. mathematics/calculus), the development of additional resources to further aid students with lower levels of mathematics and finally, the development of even more kinematics based video resources based on student requests.
A factor in academic staff being reluctant to drastically change the format of subjects is the substantial outlay of time required in an already time-poor workload, spread across teaching and research duties. The emphasis has to be placed on the long term benefits in terms of time, with the majority of work/resources created in the first year of delivery.