Flipping the Classroom at Scale to Achieve Integration of Theory and Practice in a First-Year Engineering Design and Build Course

There are a number of challenges in the development of first year inter-faculty engineering "cornerstone" design courses, not least of which is the need to integrate engineering fundamentals (theory) with engaging authentic team-based design (practice). Achieving this integration requires deliberate alignment of fundamentals to what can be wide variations in both academic and student conceptions of discipline. Within a course, integration must be achieved such that concepts are constructively aligned to the downstream artefacts of multiple hands-on design projects to avoid being interpreted as additional material to be learned but irrelevant to major assessment goals. A further challenge in an environment of ever-increasing class sizes is the development of an approach that allows for scale-up, yet also ensures students actually achieve requisite theoretical knowledge, professional ability, and behavioural learning outcomes. A large scale (1200 students) Flipped Classroom (FC) second-semester first-year engineering compulsory course was designed, implemented, operated and evaluated at a leading researchintensive university in Australia over the past 3 years to address these challenges. The FC model, where material is delivered online allowing face-to-face interactions to be grounded in authentic disciplinary practices, aligned with the need for scale-up. Integrating theory with practice in this way is necessary to drive deeper conceptual understanding of engineering fundamentals2, 9. This paper will elaborate on the curriculum design rationale for this course, its implementation, and the results of the extensive and ongoing evaluation. The methods and process detailed in the paper can be used to aid similar processes.