EXPERIENCES WITH A BLENDED LEARNING CONCEPT IN A FIRST YEAR ENGINEERING MECHANICS COURSE

Profound knowledge of Engineering Mechanics is one of the key ingredients of every engineering education. However, many students perceive the subject as rather difficult and the success rate is relatively low. Thus, the aim of this contribution is to share some experiences with blended learning, flipped classroom scenarios in Engineering Mechanics on an undergraduate level at a technical university, to investigate if the learning experience can be improved and the success rate increased. The course in question is an exercise course (german: Uebungen) on the fundamentals of statics and mechanics of materials worth 2 ECTS credits. The learning target is to be able to transfer mechanical concepts to specific problems in order to accurately solve them. Ultimately, the students should be able to properly size trusses and shafts using the concepts learned throughout the course in order to be prepared for further courses based on this knowledge. Such a setting is the ideal platform for flipped classroom scenarios due to the high emphasis on the solution of specific problem sets. This allows using the limited f2f time to discuss specific difficulties students came across when solving the problem sets and to further consolidate the acquired knowledge by re-teaching certain misunderstood concepts or even solving additional problems. Since the aim is to raise students' knowledge of Engineering Mechanics by engaging their interaction with the subject, this contribution will also compare outcomes of courses using the methods described above with similar courses that do not use such methods.