Student and Instructor Experiences in the Inverted Classroom

This paper discusses our ongoing experiences with teaching software engineering through an inverted classroom. This course format moves traditional lectures out of in-class hours and into the student's personal study time with prerecorded lectures. We support the inverted classroom with complementary techniques, such as structured discussions, weekly quizzes to ensure students watch the lectures before discussion, an innovative Lego-based workshop, a term project, and guest lectures by industry professionals. The inverted classroom allows the students to have an effective educational experience that encompasses both traditional lectures and an active learning environment. To evaluate the efficacy of this format, we use surveys and interviews of both instructors and students. We examine the time commitment of teaching with this method, from both the instructors' perspective and the students'. We also discuss the time commitment for instructor preparation, and quantitative measures of how the inverted classroom helps smooth the variance in the quality of each instructor's teaching. We also analyze the effectiveness of this technique and our methods for mitigating unintended consequences, such as students having an inexact understanding of the material. Through this evaluation, we distill the effects on student learning and instructor teaching.