Learning outside the classroom - Flipping an undergraduate circuits analysis course

While the use of technology has increased in education, much of that technology, such as use of PowerPoint, SmartBoards and use of the Internet, has been used in the same pedagogical approach, which is lecture in the class, followed by homework outside of the classroom. While student engagement through active learning has been demonstrated to enhance learning, one of the challenges to faculty is how to include these active learning methods while still trying to cover sufficient material. Over the last few years, the use of technology has opened up another instructional strategy, called flipping the classroom. In this strategy, students take on a greater responsibility for their learning, and lectures that would normally be given by the professor in the classroom are now available online. Therefore, the classroom time can be used to engage students in problem solving activities, while the professor acts more like a facilitator of learning rather than a lecturer. In a four year Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology program, one of the sections of a junior level circuits course was converted to a flipped course as a beta test for this concept. Over the last few years, lectures in the course by the author have been converted into smaller learning objects, resulting in videos of less than 10 minutes. In many cases, a lesson may be comprised of 3-4 of these videos. The videos were created using Camtasia Relay, and uploaded to a Course Management System webpage (using Moodle), in a structured sequence. While many of these videos were created from previous PowerPoint slides developed by the author, many others were created using a specialized paper tablet called PAPERSHOW, which enables screen capture and video while writing on this tablet. Over 50 videos were created for this course, and each week students were expected to review the videos related to the upcoming week's topics. Assessments were developed for learning outcomes for each week, along with assessments on the students' perception of the effectiveness on the video material. This paper will describe the process of creating these videos, the structure of the course, and a summary of the assessments of both the student learning and the perceived effectiveness of this process.