On Flipping a Large Signal Processing Class

Modern academy traces its roots back to the medieval universities established between the 12th and the 14th centuries [1]. Much has changed in the world of academia during the millennium that separates a modern university from a medieval one. Among these changes, there are two that arguably stand out the most. First, university education is no longer considered the exclusive purview of a select few; rather, it has become a basic human right for all. Second, technology has become an integral component of university education, be it the delivery of information through multimedia presentations, the use of email for student–teacher interactions, the reliance on course management systems for submission and grading of assignments, or the adoption of e-books as class texts. But there is one thing in academia that has remained largely unchanged since the advent of medieval university, namely, the mode of instruction. Lecturing—in which an instructor imparts knowledge to its audience by standing in front of them and reciting relevant information that is recorded by the attendees—was the only mode of instruction in medieval universities [1]. And lecturing remains the dominant mode of instruction in modern academy. This is despite the fact that research on learning indicates lecturing is not the most effective means of helping students master the course material [2]–[5]. The reason for the survival of lectures in modern academy is simple: among all the modes of instruction available to today’s instructors, lecturing remains the quickest and cheapest means of educating large numbers of students. The purpose of this article is to argue, however, that a carefully “flipped” classroom can be used to replace a traditional lecture-based classroom with minimal time, cost, and infrastructure overhead, even for large classes with 100’s of students. The findings reported in this article are mostly based on the author’s seminal 15-week flipped offering of a junior-level signal processing class with final enrollment of 133 students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in Spring 2016 Semester.