Flipping the Engineering Classroom: Results and Observations with Non-Engineering Students

Flipping a classroom is an innovative teaching method in itself. This method faces additional challenges when the students are not actually engineering majors. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the development, implementation, and assessment of a flipped classroom for a thermal-fluids course for non-engineering majors. Problem solving is a critical component of engineering education; an engineering student cannot only read problem statements or solely attend a lecture. However, duration of student contact in the classroom is constrained by credit hours. In a local survey, most students indicated that they would not take the time to complete not-for-grade problems on their own after class. For many of these students, graded homework assignments are the first and only experience they have in solving complex engineering problems prior to exams. By only receiving lectures and struggling to work homework problems individually, it is arguable that few of these students are able to progress beyond the lower tiers of Bloom's taxonomy. Historical time survey data suggests that the students conduct little to no daily preparation when there are no graded requirements and conversely show extremely large time spikes when out of class assignments are due or prior to in-class evaluations. Finally, in-class lectures force an instructor to teach a certain amount of material in a limited timeframe irrespective of the rate at which each student can retain or comprehend that information regardless of the experience level of the student. Inspired by the pedagogical concept of 'flipping the classroom,' Khan Academy online instructional videos, and the Thayer Method (whereby students prepare prior to class, recite the topic to their instructors and receive daily evaluations) the authors created a blended course. This blended course leveraged the digital age through video lectures before class and combined it with traditional engineering problem solving in class. The goals of this blended course are as follows: improve the quality and efficiency of student learning by conducting lectures outside of class and homework during class; allow non-engineering students to learn each lesson's material at their own pace and provide a valuable study tool for exam preparation; increase the time spent in classroom solving problems with instructors; leverage one-on-one time in the classroom where the instructor can better approach each individual's issues; encourage and enable non-engineering students to take more responsibility for their learning and become lifelong learners; and inspire intellectual curiosity in the field of engineering. The instructors developed a preliminary beta test for the initial third of an undergraduate introductory course in thermal-fluid systems and kept the remainder of the course unchanged from its traditional lecture method to gain student feedback. This feedback was used to develop a completely blended course consisting of non-engineering majors; the results of which are studied and presented in this paper.