Community colleges provide an important pathway for many prospective engineering graduates, especially those from traditionally underrepresented groups. However, due to a lack of facilities, resources, student demand and/or local faculty expertise, the breadth and frequency of engineering course offerings is severely restricted at many community colleges. This in turn presents challenges for students trying to maximize their transfer eligibility and preparedness. Through a grant from the National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program (NSF IUSE), three community colleges from Northern California collaborated to increase the availability and accessibility of a comprehensive lower-division engineering curriculum, even at small-to-medium sized community colleges. This was accomplished by developing resources and teaching strategies that could be employed in a variety of delivery formats (e.g., fully online, online/hybrid, flipped face-to-face, etc.), providing flexibility for local community colleges to leverage according to their individual needs. This paper focuses on the iterative development, testing, and refining of the resources for an introductory Materials Science course with 3-unit lecture and 1-unit laboratory components. This course is required as part of recently adopted statewide model associate degree curricula for transfer into Civil, Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing engineering bachelor’s degree programs at California State Universities. However, offering such a course is particularly challenging for many community colleges, because of a lack of adequate expertise and/or laboratory facilities and equipment. Consequently, course resources were developed to help mitigate these challenges by streamlining preparation for instructors new to teaching the course, as well as minimizing the face-to-face use of traditional materials testing equipment in the laboratory portion of the course. These same resources can be used to support online hybrid and other alternative (e.g., emporium) delivery approaches. After initial pilot implementation of the course during the Spring 2015 semester by the curriculum designer in a flipped student-centered format, these same resources were then implemented by an instructor who had never previously taught the course, at a different community college that did not have its own materials laboratory facilities. A single site visit was arranged with a nearby community college to afford students an opportunity to complete certain lab activities using traditional materials testing equipment. Lessons learned during this attempt were used to inform curriculum revisions, which were evaluated in a repeat offering the following year. In all implementations of the course, student surveys and interviews were used to determine students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the course resources, student use of these resources, and overall satisfaction with the course. Additionally, student performance on objective assessments was compared with that of traditional lecture delivery of the course by the curriculum designer in prior years. During initial implementations of the course, results from these surveys and assessments revealed low levels of student satisfaction with certain aspects of the flipped approach and course resources, as well as reduced learning among students at the alternate institution. Subsequent modifications to the curriculum and delivery approach were successful in addressing most of these deficiencies.
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The Impact of Integrating a Flipped Lecture in a Biotransport Laboratory Course on Student Learning and Engagement
Introduction: Inquiry-based learning is vital to the engineering design process, and most crucially in the laboratory and hands-on settings. Through the model of inquiry-based design, student teams are able to formulate critical inputs to the design process and develop a stronger and more relevant understanding of theoretical principles and their applications. In the junior-level Biotransport laboratory course at Purdue University’s Weldon School of BME, the curriculum utilizes the engineering design process to guide students through three (3) different modules covering different Biotransport phenomena (diffusivity, mass transport, and heat transfer). Students are required to research, conceptualize, and generate hypotheses around a module prompt. Students design, execute, and analyze their own experimental setups to test the hypotheses within an autodidactic peer-learning structure.
Methods: A multi-year study was completed spanning from 2014 to 2016, assessing students’ end of course evaluations. With an integration of the flipped lecture into the lab being first implemented in 2015 (prior to 2015, the flipped lecture was a stand-alone course offered outside of the lab sections), the data presented here offers a comparison of student evaluations between these two course structures. Per the student response rates, the sample size for each year was: n=81 (2016); n=60 (2015); n=48 (2014). The surveys were anonymous and a host of questions related to overall course satisfaction, structure, and content were posed.
Results: Analysis of the data showed a consistent increase in overall student satisfaction with the course following the implementation of the new structure. The percent of students giving a satisfactory rating or higher for the 2014, 2015 and 2016 course offerings was 79%, 89%, 92%, respectively. This shows a significant difference between 2014 and 2016.
Conclusion: The integration of a flipped lecture into the lab successfully improved student satisfaction and self-perceived understanding of course material. This format also improved the delivery of content to students as assessed by maintaining pertinence to the lab topics and clear understanding of learning concepts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1752366
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10171335
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--31109
