Targeted inversion of the tutorials in "Mathematics for Chemists", a case study

Abstract

We present a case study for a new teaching concept mainly characterized by a "targeted inversion" of the tutorials that accompany the lecture in Mathematics for Chemists at TU Berlin. The framework of this new concept is a student reform project funded by TU Berlin, called 'educationZEN'. Central points of the targeted inversion are: 1. Face-to-face meetings for active calculations where the students directly solve the exercises. 2. Example calculations and basic definitions offered as online videos. 3. A flexible time span to solve the exercises 4. Iterative correction cycles (finally 80 % of the exercises had to be correct for admission to the exam). 5. Peer assessment elements, especially peer marking of a mock exam. The students' success in the final exam improved significantly. While generally about 50 % of all students failed to pass the final exam, this value dropped to 18 %. The average mark of the students passing the exam improved significantly from 2.7 to 1.7.

Full text

Targeted inversion of the tutorials in “Mathematics for Chemists”,
a case study
Franz-Josef Schmitta,*, Thilo Schönnemanna, Fabian Krusea, Franziska Egbersa,
Sascha Delitzschera, Jörn Weißenborna, Ahmad Aljanazrahb, Thomas Friedricha
aTechnical University Berlin, Institute of Chemistry, Max-Volmer-Laboratory of Biophysical Chemistry, Straße
des 17. Juni 135, D-10623 Berlin, Germany
bBirzeit University, Faculty of Education, Curriculum and Instruction Department, PO Box 14, Birzeit, West
Bank, Palestine
*corresponding author: schmitt@physik.tu-berlin.de
Abstract:
We present a case study for a new teaching concept mainly characterized by a “targeted inversion” of the tutorials that
accompany the lecture in Mathematics for Chemists at TU Berlin. The framework of this new concept is a student reform
project funded by TU Berlin, called ‘educationZEN’. Central points of the targeted inversion are: 1. Face-to-face meetings for
active calculations where the students directly solve the exercises. 2. Example calculations and basic definitions offered as
online videos. 3. A flexible time span to solve the exercises 4. Iterative correction cycles (finally 80 % of the exercises had to
be correct for admission to the exam). 5. Peer assessment elements, especially peer marking of a mock exam. The students’
success in the final exam improved significantly. While generally about 50 % of all students failed to pass the final exam, this
value dropped to 18 %. The average mark of the students passing the exam improved significantly from 2.7 to 1.7.
Introduction
New media have developed to a tool that left the role of pure content management far behind. They
became standard tools that form our daily life reaching from the permanent availability on our smartphone via
social networks to all the applications available to support our daily life. Also teaching undergoes a
transformation due to the new media. Their implementation into general higher educational teaching is
understood as blended learning or online teaching today (Bonk & Graham, 2006; Garrison & Vaughan, 2008).
When Sebastian Thrun offered his online course for artificial intelligence, he taught 160.000 students
simultaneously via his blended learning concept. The idea of the flipped/ inverted classroom arose as the idea of
massive open online courses (MOOCs) (Baker, 2000; Berrett, 2012; Bishop & Verleger, 2012). Stanford, UC
Berkeley and the University of Michigan have founded an own online teaching portal (https://www.coursera.org)
and promote blended learning in unison as the future of the web 3.0 although the experience from practice already
raises a series of doubts and criticisms today (Spitzer, 2012).
According to the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in its second
information technology in education study (Law & Chow, 2008), ICT-use in teaching and learning brings a
stronger 21st-century orientation to pedagogy in both mathematics and science classrooms.
To handle the Janus-faced blended learning concepts one has to extract the optimal and/or most advantageous
elements from online teaching concepts leaving disadvantageous elements. It might be useful to add innovative
teaching concepts to compensate for the appearing disadvantages on the other side. Usage and additional
‘compensation’ for online teaching elements might just comprise a small part of a lecture course or exercise
tutorial. It does not necessarily need to substitute the whole event (Olapiriyakul & Scher, 2006).
Blended learning elements should be applied to substitute particularly those parts of a lecture that are judged to be
long-breathed and therefore likely not to be followed in detail by the students. Exactly these parts are suited to
benefit from online offers. Examples in mathematics teaching might be extensive mathematic proofs or example
exercises on the side of theory and complicated explanations which are often repeated in student practical courses
on the side of lab practice. The flip should be done partially, targeted to the desired learning outcome. This is the
reason why we speak about the concept of ‘targeted inversion’.
There is no specific form of flipped or inverted classrooms, the core idea of this form is that instruction which
used to take place in class is accessed in advance at home (or another place where internet is available) through

teacher pre-created/ recorded online videos, while, in-class time is used for doing other student-centered activities
such as solving problems, deepen concepts or working out cooperative assignments (Baker, 2000; Fulton, 2012;
Bergmann& Sams, 2012; Tucker, 2012). According to Schultz et. al. (2014) flipped-class chemistry students’
performed better and even had a favorable perception about this approach, that is learn at home and practice in
class.
There is a high need to use innovative teaching elements that increase the student’s understanding and help to pass
exams while at the same time reducing the teaching effort. On the other side it is impossible to demand from a
teacher to spend hundreds of additional hours to work on inverting a teaching course. The inversion has to be
supported by external forces as long as there is an additional cost in efforts, and, ultimately, the concept has to be
innovative in such a way that it is cost-neutral or even less demanding for the teaching staff. Such seemingly
ambivalent demands can be realized with two teaching elements: 1) the production of online teaching videos and
2) the peer review system applied to students’ exercises, tests or even marking (Fry, 1990; Topping, 1998; Lui &
Andrade, 2014). The first of these elements bears the risk that the students lose contact to the teacher and the
teacher loses control about the students’ reception of the taught content. The latter is often restricted by legal
regulations that forbid the acquisition of teaching marks by peer marking systems among students. In this study,
we show that it is possible to use both elements in such a way that the mentioned disadvantages are annihilated
and the regulations of university teaching are preserved.
Here, we delineate a concept that combines elements of traditional teaching with blended learning extracting the
most promising elements of modern teaching concepts while reducing the effort of the teachers. Today, the
targeted inversion of the Mathematics exercises for Bachelor students of Chemistry at the Berlin Institute of
Technology (TU Berlin) has been established and successfully applied in the third academic year, with the fully
inverted course program including all relevant teaching materials being available since the winter semester
2014/15.
The educationZEN concept
The basic idea of the educationZEN concept at TU Berlin comprises a few elements that aim at shifting
the character of teaching courses from a teacher-centered to a more student-centered learning environment in
order to improve the impact of teaching in a measurable way such that the number of students passing the exam in
first attempt increases. For that purpose students are guided to meet high criteria, which at the same time improve
the self-assessment of the individual learning success before undergoing an attempt to pass the exam. Such
criteria comprise the requirement to complete a high percentage (80 %) of exercises (homework) correctly. Even
stronger, this criterion was constructed in such a way that 80 % of all exercises have to be solved completely
correct. This element is a rather behavioristic teaching principle.
On the other hand it is necessary to keep the workload for the teachers at an acceptable level and give the students
enough flexibility and support to meet these rather high requirements. For that purpose, educationZEN identifies
elements of lectures and tutorials that can be offered as online teaching materials to dedicate time of the students
attendance at university to active collaboration, in which they can directly work on the requirements to meet the
admission criteria for the exam in a highly constructive way.
These interactive calculation exercises are the central element of educationZEN. The teacher slips into the role of
a student supervisor to strengthen their collaborative work and to give them advises how to meet the admission
criteria for the exam of course. The students are allowed to hand in their solutions for the exercises over a large
time span to create flexibility necessary to handle the high requirements of the admission criteria and the
corresponding workload of parallel courses. After receiving the correction/ feedback from the teacher, the
students are allowed to hand in a second, third or, depending on the teachers concept, also more attempts to
achieve a fully correct solution. Only a solution of an exercise that is also in formal terms fully correct results in a
credit for the admission criterion, otherwise the student is asked for another round of improvement (see Fig. 1).
The role of the educationZEN tutorials to achieve successful solutions are relevant in such sense as the students
collaborate all together in an open working space to achieve the criterion. Each student is asked to present a
self-written solution, however the students have to work together to solve the exercises.

EducationZEN has to keep the teachers’ and students’ workload is an acceptable range while guaranteeing that
the students really can pass the admission criteria if they make use the offered support and, finally, deliver the
outcome that the number of students passing the final exam rises. Especially the latter is also reducing the
workload and psychological stress of teachers and
students as it reduces the need to undergo several
attempts for the exam. Depending on the effort
therefore peer assessment can be used for the first
correction cycles (see below). Continuous feedback is
provided to the students by a continuously visible
registry system, in which they can see the topics already
mastered. Finally, a mock exam offered one or two
weeks before the final exam helps them to judge the
state of their actual learning progress.
Additional components of educationZEN can be added
to help organizing the teaching course. These include
online tutorials or exercises via skype, the possibility to
hand in solutions on an internet platform and to discuss
them in blogs online, or to deliver them to the teacher
via email.
Much of the success of the educationZEN concept can
be explained due to the fact that it followed new trends
in education which state that the effective use of
technology in education should be built on sound
learning theories (Ally, 2004). For example, providing
students with online instructional videos and flipped
classroom exercises are applications of the
constructivist school of learning which sees learners as being active rather than passive.
In addition, educationZEN project initiated a new form of pedagogy that has been proven to be one of the options
that can make a contribution to enhance the quality of university teaching and learning along with other
investigated forms of blended learning involving the different mixing recipes of Information and Communication
Technologies (ICT) in education (Aljanazrah, 2006; Law, 2008).
In the following, we will present the principal implementation of educationZEN elements into mathematics for
chemists. It results in the ‘targeted inversion’ of the tutorials. The targeted inversion basically shifts elements of
the traditional teaching in these tutorials like the presentation of example calculations into the homework of the
students as the students have to watch these as online videos at home. Thereby, the precious time of the students’
university attendance is dedicated to work on traditional ‘homework’ tasks under direct supervision and the
support of the teachers and tutors.
The targeted inversion of Mathematics for Chemists courses
Mathematics courses offered for students of mathematics, natural sciences and engineering at TU Berlin usually
are accompanied by tutorials. These tutorial sessions supplement the regular lecture and are conducted by student
tutors who summarize and clarify important lecture materials and discuss and answer required homework
problems. As in lectures, tutorials tend to emphasize teaching rather than learning using the so called ‘Chalk
Talks’ format (Hudson & Luska, 2013), but with smaller numbers of students and more space for question-answer
discussions. Hudson & Luska suggested to change the tutorials from ‘chalk talks’ in the first semester “to a lecture
capture format in the second in which PowerPoint slides, ink annotations, and associated audio were recorded,
and uploaded online to be viewable by any student at any time.” (Hudson & Luska, 2013)
With the aim of enhancing the quality of chemistry students’ learning by moving to a more student-centered
learning environment, educationZEN partially flipped the tutorials in a targeted way.
Figure 1: Scheme for the role of the educationZEN
tutorials (active calculation exercises) to achieve high
admission criteria with flexible and iterative
solutions of the exercises

The online videos along with other online learning resources, relevant announcements, an overview on the
curriculum, organization tools for the course and a student forum to discuss topics have been developed and
uploaded to the internet teaching platorm ISIS of TU Berlin.
In mathematics for chemists, educationZEN comprises of the following parts:
 A number of about 200 Online videos has been produced, which contain exactly balanced examples
necessary to solve the exercises for the 80 % admission criterion for the exam.
 The offer of face-to-face meetings as active calculation exercises in which the students can directly solve
the exercises.
 Online support by the teacher or his assistant is provided (skype, email)
 Iterative correction cycles of the exercises during a large time span are offered with high flexibility.
 Peer assessment elements are offered, in which parts of the exercises or a mock exam is corrected by the
students themselves.
The lecture and the general tutorials remain, however, the number of classical tutorials is reduced to shift
capacities into the educationZEN tutorials.
Figure 2: Html pages summarizing the content of a lecture and presenting the corresponding videos of a sample topic
like complex numbers (left panel). Two screenshots of typical teaching videos for this topic (right panel)
Instructional videos, sometimes called tutorial videos or lecture videos, are usually made up of instructors’ audio
narrative connected to a series of computer screenshots that display topic content (Brecht, 2012). Other
technologies allow producing tutoring videos that are based on voice and handwriting not only of teachers but
also the students which are similar to the traditional face to face tutoring using writing and explanation (He et al.,
2012). We also chose that form for our videos produced to support Mathematics for Chemists courses. In both
cases the content is casted as it appears on the computer screen and produced in form of a so called “screencast”.
It has been found that instructional videos can increase learner’s engagement, control of learning and
independence (Hudson & Luska, 2013; He et al., 2012, Law, 2008; Law&Chow, 2008, Schultz et al., 2014).
Chemistry students can access and watch those videos whenever they want and wherever they are if they have

internet access and, more importantly, they can listen to them repeatedly or scroll back as needed depending on
their own pace of learning.
For a clear arrangement of all the about 200 available teaching videos in relation to the actual curriculum of the
course, html-based webpages were developed and linked to the ISIS system that also subsumes the most relevant
definitions and some written examples for each topic. These pages offer the corresponding videos where mostly
example calculations are presented. It´s done in such way that the materials exactly match the teaching demands,
can be perceived in the time foreseen for the educationZEN tutorial preparation and avoid repetitions (see Fig. 2).
The infrastructure can now be used for the two courses “mathematics for chemists I” and “mathematics for
chemists II” that are offered in annual turns each for 240 students per year. There is no need for changes or
maintenance of the online content and the videos as the content of one semester can easily be migrated to the next
year, and minor readjustments are easily doable.
Each semester, about 120 students attend one of these courses, mathematics for chemists I in the winter semester
and mathematics for chemists II in the summer semester. Since the time that has been freed due to the produced
videos is fully spent for the interactive calculation exercises, there is no immediate payoff of the spent efforts in
terms of saved teaching capacity. However, the students learning outcome has strongly improved in a sustainable
way (see results section below). For the videos, a corporate identity has been developed including an
educationZEN Logo and the videos were offered completely open to the public on the video platform “YouTube”
creating availability with lowest possible barrier for all interested students from inside or outside TUBerlin.
Figure 3: Number of cumulative clicks on one example video of all 200 videos (here: ‘Limits of mathematical
sequences’)
Regarding the more general impact, fortunately, the offered videos were not only received by our own students in
the mathematics for chemists course but additionally a large community established as regular recipients, also in
form of channel subscriptions and users giving regular feedback on the video quality and remarks for
improvement. Since the winter semester 2013/14, when the first videos were set online, all videos produced for
the mathematics for chemists courses so far have been watched about 300.000 times on YouTube with ‘only’
about 3 % of the clicks (about 10.000) directly coming from the implemented players of the ISIS platform. The
video performance of one example targeting the topic ‘limits of mathematical sequences’ is shown in Fig. 3.
Results
The project educationZEN declared the students’ ability to pass the final exam as the major criterion to judge the
success of the project. In addition, an evaluation of the concept was conducted with the second equally important
outcome that the students accept the new teaching format and state a high level of acknowledgement for 1) the
teaching videos, 2) the strict 80% admission criterion for the final examination, 3) the offered interactive
exercise tutorials and 4) the flexibility and modus of solving the exercises. The evaluation of the concept from
students’ perspectives will be presented by another research paper that is currently in process. However all
elements were judged as helpful or very helpful and the overall concept was highly accepted and appreciated.

The students’ success in the final exam rose significantly. While generally 40 %, in some semesters more than 50
% of all students failed to pass the final exam, this value dropped to 18 % at the end of the winter semesters
2013/14 in February 2014. The average mark of the students passing the exam improved significantly from 2.7 (in
winter semester 2011/12) to 1.7 in the winter semester 2013/14 (See Fig. 4). The mark 1.0 is the best achievable
mark (“very good”), and the scale goes down to 4.0 (“sufficient”), which is granted if a student has achieved at
least 50 % of the possible credits in the exam. Below the 50 % limit, the exam is marked with “5.0” which is
“insufficient” and means “fail”.
5 4 3.7 3.3 3 2.7 2.3 2 1.7 1.3 1
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
number of students
mark
exam results 2013/14
exam results 2011/12
Figure 4: Distribution of marks (according to the German system ranging from 1.0 (very good) to 5.0 (fail)) in the
winter semester 2011/12 final exam before educationZEN (red bars) compared to the winter semester 2013/14 (black
bars)
Similar results were obtained in the summer semester 2014 in the final test in July 2014 (data not shown).
However, it has to be pointed out that some students shifted the final exam to later times as they did not achieve
the admission criteria in time. Some of these students also did not undergo the exam in the winter period 2014/15
at all showing that they most probably quit their studies.
The number of students that additionally failed the test in 2011/12 as compared to 2013/14 was bigger than the
number of students that did not even try to pass the exam in 2013/14 probably because they did not meet the
requirements or because they shifted the exam due to other reasons. So there is no prolongation effect for the
students in average. The advantage can be summarized with three conclusions: 1) the students who would fail the
test do not come to the test any more, 2) an additional small number of students who failed the test before now
pass and 3) the average mark of the students passing the test improves significantly.
The values of the winter semester 2012/13 are not shown here, since the mathematics for chemists course was
given by a different teacher and the selection of topics for the exam was highly different. However, the number of
students that failed the final exam in winter 2012/13 before establishing educationZEN was even higher in that
period with about 70 % of students failing.
During the teaching time, all students were assured to have a certain degree of guarantee to meet the admission
requirements for the final exam if they just use the offered help. This implied explicitly to attend the interactive
calculation exercises. An anonymous complaint box was established on the ISIS platform to give all students the
opportunity to communicate and solve problems timely.
Peer marking as Peer assessment
One concept to reduce the effort of teachers and student tutors while delivering a clear feedback to all students
was established as a special form of peer assessment. Peer assessment is typically a process whereby student peers
grade assignments or tests based on a teacher’s benchmarks. The practice is already conceptually designed to save
teachers time and improve students' understanding of course materials as well as improve their metacognitive
skills.

According to Marc Ihle’s concept, all students fill a form at the beginning of the mock exam and receive a certain
“pseudonym”. This pseudonym is subsequently used to identify their achievements. All students answer the
questions of the mock exam on paper and note their pseudonym on each paper sheet. After the examination the
teacher makes 2-3 copies of each students attempt and distributes the students’ deliveries to their “peers”, i.e. the
other students in the class. Certain categories of pseudonyms can help to avoid that the students get their own
results for correction and can be used to structure the class especially in case of having a large group of 100
students or more.
Additionally all students obtain a written standard solution for the mock exam, based on which they correct the
exercises of their peers and finally mark the exam they analyzed for correction. Afterwards they receive a second,
third or even fourth copy of other students’ attempts and mark them, too. The teacher can then summarize the
markings for each individual student by averaging the recognized achievements of each exam item and also
averaging the final mark. In case of large deviations between different corrections the teacher checks these
corrections and corrects them if necessary. Otherwise, the results might just be distributed to the original authors
of the mock exams solution and they can, of course, analyze their attempts and review the corrections and
marking. This form of peer marking was conducted in the summer semester 2014 in the mathematics for chemists
II course.
In case of larger groups, this particular form of peer marking demands a huge effort for copying the students exam
deliveries. Therefore, this part of making copies was omitted when applying peer marking to Mathematics for
Chemists and the students just correct one test of one of their fellow students. As this form of peer marking saves
time in comparison to a marking concept where 2-3 or more copies of test deliveries are marked, the students were
asked to spend this more time to review the corrections of their own test which can be identified by the
pseudonyms afterwards. The exam questions were discussed in the group. One appointment should be used to
discuss disagreements between the authors of the test and their (unknown) reviewers for example by keeping time
in an exercise for the students to ask questions regarding the corrections they received.
As the group of students in the winter semester 2014/15 was larger compared to that of the summer semester
2014, the latter variant of peer marking was chosen. Fig. 5 shows the results of the students in form of a histogram
of the achieved percentage of points in each exam question (30 points could be achieved all together with 4 points
mostly, 7 points for curve sketching and three points for convergence of series) including the corresponding
standard deviation of the mean.
1234567
0,0
0,5
1,0
#7: extreme
points under
constraints
#5:
curve-
sketching
#6:
Integrals
#4: Taylor:
#3:
Rule of
L´Hospital
#2:
convergence
of series
average points
exercise
average points
with standard deviation
#1: complex
numbers
Figure: 5 results of the students in the mock exam in winter semester 2014/15 as percentage of each question that was
correctly answered in average including standard deviation of the mean.
Interestingly, it already turned out in the winter semester 2013/14 that the students correct and mark themselves in
a much more critical way than the teachers. This is partially explained by the fact that they do their corrections
strongly focused on the standard solution and have difficulties to correctly assess solutions that are only partially
correct.

The results from the peer marking of a mock examination in the winter semester 2014/15 are worse compared to
the expected outcome for the final exam as shown above for the winter semester 2013/14. Similar deviations
between the mock exam and the final exam in 2013/14 have been observed before and indicate several
problematic tendencies such as 1) the mock exam obviously falls into a period in which the students are not fully
prepared for the exam, 2) the students strongly use the last days to prepare for the final exam, and 3) as mentioned
above the marking of peers is mostly more critical than the marking by teachers. However, a positive outcome is
that the students accurately know after the mock exam which topics they should especially focus on during the
final preparation for the exam.
Formative evaluation
Another central element of educationZEN is the formative evaluation, an electronic evaluation of the students’
progress in solving the exercises that is able to uncover the problematic or poorly understood topics of the lecture
giving the teacher the ability to focus on particularly problematic topics in order to help the students to solve them
finally. Such formative evaluation was developed in educationZEN by programming a tool for the registration of
students’ progress during the course and in test exams that are offered before the exam. It c an also be offered in
form of online-based feedback-on-demand systems that show open questions from students to the teacher directly
during the lecture or show the overall understanding of all participants in a lecture in form of a histogram.
Available in the internet such tools can be downloaded and used in any course (e.g. letsfeedback.com)
The formative evaluation allows the teacher to focus on the topics that have been poorly understood. For example
Fig. 5 exhibits the facts that especially the topics that are scheduled late in the course curriculum like ‘integration’
and ‘extreme points under constraints’ need an additional elucidation in the last week before the exam.
Complex numbers, the rule of l´Hospital and curve sketching as well as Taylor series expansions are better
understood. A year ago, in the winter semester 2013/14 the data showed that the rule of l´Hospital was poorly
understood (data not shown). As the topic of the rule of l´Hospital to calculate limits of mathematical sequences is
a rather compact and clearly topic that can be well explained, the efforts to explain the topic were strengthened in
2014/15. The new findings point the opposite result showing that achievements to improve the understanding of
this important and rather simple rule have been successful.
Conclusion and Outlook
The paradigm of the applied teaching concept is two simple premises: 1) Take the best of each concept and
combine to a concise teaching strategy. 2) Ask your students to do exercise on each topic of your course but give
them time and provide all necessary help to do so. Although seeming rather general and simple, this strategy
might improve many teaching courses significantly.
On the other hand it might be worthwhile to investigate the concept of other ‘new’ learning methods, question
them and change the details, if necessary. One example is directly given by the modification of the peer marking
concept as we used it in the mathematics for chemists in 2014/15: Since the procedure of distributing multiple
copies of each exam demands a huge paperwork and causes a quite long break between writing the mock exam
and the subsequent marking, the concept was changed just by omitting the copying part and having each test
corrected only once by peers. Still, this procedure allows for a clear interaction of the students with their
assessment and discuss about their mistakes in the remaining time.
When suggesting this concept to teachers, we often received the statement that the huge amount of paperwork the
time for preparing the copies was the reason not to offer the Peer marking concept.
The targeted inversion of teaching courses harbors additional advantages: It opens the university for distance
learning, side entrance, support during the own studies, it gives easier access of university learning contents to
pupils, offers material for a ‘studium generale’ or orientation studies as well as training of (adult) professionals. It
opens the university horizontally (between different countries) as giving the opportunity of distance learning and
vertically (for people with various interests and different professions) as supporting various degrees of
understanding and supporting different ways of thinking (Lage et al. 2000, Khan 2012).
Easy Recognition systems for the gathered achievements can help to improve teaching significantly in a way that
standardized elements are highly automatized (in form of the mentioned behavioristic “machine learning” type
learning environment while free spaces are generated for constructivist and collaborative learning.

The complex nature of MINT (Mathematics, engineering, natural science and technology) subjects has
implications for teaching. It is a difficult task for the students that such studies include basic knowledge of higher
mathematics and physics but also experimental expertise and preparative skills. Some students help themselves
by establishing learning groups and frequent consultation of the tutors and scientific coworkers and therefore have
much less problems with the theoretical subjects. This process will be highly improved.
The enhanced students’ level achievement shown in this paper are very much in line with evidence in the
literature. According to Schultz et. al. (2014) flipped-class chemistry students’ performed better and even had a
favorable perception about this approach, that is learn at home and practice in class.
To improve the targeted inversion further formative evaluation has to be done as well as further research on the
optimized methodology. In parallel to the evaluation of the students success also investigations on students digital
habits and evaluation of the educationZEN concept from students’ perspective has been conducted by Dr.
Aljanazrah (Aljanazrah et al., in process). The outcome of these evaluations is currently used for further
improvements.
The ultimate teaching concept is successful if every student who participates in the course until the end and the
final exam also passes the exam.
Acknowledgements:
The team of educationZEN acknowledges support by TU Berlin in the framework of the student reform project
educationZEN. Special thanks belongs to the board of teaching and studying and the board of the faculty who
were both engaged in long discussions and contributed with constructive criticism to the success of this project.
We thank Christian Thomsen, Hans-Ulrich Heiß, Christian Schroeder, Rudi Seiler, Cornelia Raue, Patrick
Thurian, Nediljiko Budisa, Patrick Durkin, Georg Meran, Marco Runkel, Radosveta Ivanova-Stenzel, Daniela
Fliegner, Monika Noji, Birgit Kanngießer and Boris Springborn for their will to cooperate with us in the
framework of educationZEN.
The authors thank the rest of the educationZEN team and all people involved in teaching, namely Alexander
Scharz, Jörn Weißenborn, Malte Reißig, Jörg Richter, Cornelia Otto, Holly McKee, Kevin Rhinow, Christiane
Schinkel, Rafael Lingemann, Csongor Keuer, Mario Willoweit, Bianca Theis, Ludwig Lath, Anja Greif, Hilke
Bahmann, Roman Schmack, Hoang Tam Dang, Marc Lambrecht, Marcel Schmidt, Daniel Platt, Sabrina Dill,
Caterina Liesegang, Thomas Giebe, Fabian Berkemeier, Oliver Franke.
Thomas Friedrich and Franz-Josef Schmitt especially thank the Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft and
Joachim Herz Stiftung for supporting the projects “Onlineprojektlabor Chemie im Alltag” und “IGT
educationTUB”.
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