Designing flipped learning implementations for electronics courses

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic during year 2020 many higher education institutes were forced to switch to remote teaching on a very short notice. The rapid change from on-campus to remote teaching showed us that effective remote teaching needs totally new forms of course implementations. The idea that one just moves the on-campus teaching to a distance learning platform without changing anything else was found to be inefficient and passivating for students.<br/>Flipped Learning Method (FLM) has been successfully utilized in many fields, <br/>including engineering education. The students’ learning is enhanced and deepened when they study the basic concepts of a subject remotely in the place and time that suits them, and the face-to-face time is reserved for issues on the higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. In engineering studies, the possibility to utilize technology and technological tools are important. Nowadays the technological tools, such as the internet, simulation devices and various pieces of software, are widely available to students thus enabling and supporting the FLM. <br/><br/>The FLM has been taken into use during couple of recent years in Tampere <br/>University. The COVID-19 situation gave us a trigger to adopt FLM in our courses. We believe that FLM is very suitable to hybrid teaching, where remote and on-campus teaching are combined in the same course implementation. In this paper, we will report our experiences on the rapid change to remote teaching on year 2020, the reasons for taking FLM into use, and the FLM planning and designing process of our courses.