A Hybrid Flipped Classroom Approach to Teaching a Power Electronics Course to Electrical Engineering Students

Western Carolina University is the only educational institution that offers engineering and technology degrees in the western part of the state which is home to major national and international engineering-related companies. As the power industry has a significant share among these companies and is becoming one of the major recruiters of our graduates in the Department of Engineering and Technology at Western Carolina University, developing an emphasis in electric power engineering plays a vital role in educating the next generation of the region’s power industry workforce. To that end, a curriculum development effort was planned and is projected to train, prepare for research, and educate the students enrolled in the Department of Engineering and Technology for careers in the power industry. The curriculum includes three fundamental power engineering courses: 1. Electric Power Systems 2. Power Electronics 3. Electrical Machines and Drives The first two courses have been developed and implemented under the guidance of the Consortium of Universities for Sustainable Power (CUSP) at University of Minnesota. This paper describes in detail the first two pilot implementations of the Power Electronics course for Electrical Engineering (EE) undergraduates and presents its assessment results. The pedagogical concept that was used is called “Flipped Classroom Pedagogy” in which active student engagement is facilitated through on-line pre-recorded lectures. To enhance this concept, a hybrid approach to the traditional lecture was applied. In this approach, students are exposed to both on-line and face-to-face lecture methods. In addition, this approach included a short online quiz through Blackboard before each course module and a short quiz at the start of class session after each course module to improve student participation. In fact, a 2010 U.S. Department of Education report concluded that “Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction”. However this report targeted very broad population including K-12, career technology, medical and higher education, as well as corporate and military training. In addition, many studies in this report did not attempt to equate (a) all the curriculum materials, (b) aspects of pedagogy and (c) learning time in the treatment and control conditions. Therefore, the study presented in this paper is unique in a sense that the analysis is only for electrical engineering students based on specific curriculum contents and hybrid flipped classroom pedagogy where online and in-class lecture components present. End of year survey data of two consecutive year course offerings were collected to evaluate the overall course and the faculty performance as well as the sustainability of the established course concept.