Iterative Improvement in Flipped Classroom Teaching of Lower Division Engineering Courses

Lower division engineering courses are important yet hard to teach as many students find these highly abstracted material hard to comprehend. Recent studies have suggested that flipped classroom teaching has potential to improve the teaching and learning of lower division engineering courses. While some educators are optimistic about the potential impact that flipped classroom teaching might provide, there are still many challenges to overcome during implementation. One of the major challenges faced by course developers, especially first-time developers, is to manage the heavy workload needed to design an effective practice that is suitable for their unique student body. This paper presents an iterative framework to help ease the adoption and continuous improvement of flipped classroom teaching, so that students' learning experience can be optimized over time. The framework is composed of two phases -- the initial design phase and the iterative tuning phase. In the initial design phase, a strategy that allows an instructor to quickly convert the existing course materials used for other lecturing methods into those suitable for flipped classroom teaching is introduced. This process involves designing a course structure according to its objectives, rearranging course content, and patching additional resources. Then, the iterative tuning for improvement will be explained, with a focus on identifying and addressing the most critical areas for improvement. Since the course instructor only focuses on resolving the most critical issues every semester, the workload becomes manageable. The flipped classroom teaching of a lower division mechanical engineering course "ME 2040 -- Circuit Analysis for Mechanical Engineers" is used as example to explain details about the utilization of the proposed course development and implementation process. Towards the end, the effectiveness of the development process in improving students' learning outcomes is discussed.