Flipping the Design Class Using Off-the-shelf Content: Can it work?

The benefits and challenges of flipping classrooms have been demonstrated in many recent papers, including several presented in the Mechanical Engineering Division at American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition. This, combined with very negative student reviews of the current textbook, convinced the author at Ohio Northern University (ONU) to experiment with a partially-flipped classroom in the fall semester of 2013. In preparation for this, the author found a tremendous amount of already-developed video and text resources available online for no cost, and often very high quality. This led to the idea for this paper – can a flipped classroom be taught using only these types of resources? This has been done twice now at ONU in a senior-level design course. The online content includes popular videos (such as TED talks), how-to guides (either video or text), and reference materials or case studies. Initial student responses have been very positive, with some students noting they are actually enjoying an engineering class for the first time. Surveys regarding this approach, as well as student performance on common final exam questions, are included. Preliminary findings indicate that in general this approach can work, but that there are certain content areas in which the available resources are very weak. A summary of resources used and student ratings of each will also be provided.