Testing the Flipped Classroom Approach in Engineering Dynamics Class

The flipped classroom approach has been one of the hottest topics among faculty and students for engineering education. Some like it and believe that it could be one of the best teaching methods because it increases the interaction between faculty and students, and focuses on problem solving. However some faculty and students dislike the approach because they believe that direct interactive lecturing in the traditional classroom approach is more effective. In order to test the flipped classroom approach, we chose one chapter of engineering dynamics and tried the flipped classroom approach in the summer of 2014. At the end of the experiment, a student survey was utilized to collect students’ feedback. This paper presents our experiment with the flipped classroom approach, including preparation, execution, survey results, observations and findings. One interesting observation from this trial was that students with higher grades in the traditional classroom approach liked the flipped classroom approach and students with mediocre grades or lower in the traditional classroom approach disliked the flipped classroom approach. For the faculty without funding support and faculty teaching relief, a partial flipped class is a starting point in order to try the flipped classroom approach. With a partial flipped class, both faculty and students could still test the approach and had much deeper understanding of the approach.