Benefits of Active Learning Embedded in Online Content Material Supporting a Flipped Classroom

In the traditional flipped classroom paradigm, the course content is delivered online in advance of classroom time, which is reserved for active learning applications. The paradigm does not prescribe the inclusion of active learning in the online content. We examined the impact of embedding quizzes in the online content which required students to immediately apply the lessons’ content for problem-solving. Our Medical Electronics course has been structured as a flipped classroom since 2014. In the 2017 offering, video quizzes were embedded in the fourteen online lessons that support the course. Each lesson video quiz comprised 3-5 short problems, formatted as free-response and objective questions. The students were told that simply attempting the quizzes would count for a small percentage of their overall course score. The software used to produce the online video lessons generated worksheets listing the students’ responses to the embedded quiz questions scored for correctness. We examined the participation rate of the students in answering the online quiz questions during the semester and their quiz scores. We also investigated the correlations between participation and score on the online quizzes with performance on summative measures of assessment. Last, we compared the rate of online lesson viewing for the student cohort who had access to the video quizzes with the lesson viewing rates of prior cohorts who used the online lessons without embedded quizzes. We found that about 80% of students answered the online quiz questions. Receiving a high score on these questions was positively correlated with good performance on the summative assessment measures (p < 0.01). The inclusion of on-line video quizzes coincided with an increased viewership of the online video lessons that was sustained during the semester in comparison to the lesson viewership observed in prior offerings of the course. We conclude that the inclusion of online quiz questions in the video lessons added an active learning component to the lessons which increased the students’ motivation to study the online content. Active learning exercises improves learning of the online lessons in the flipped classroom. Introduction and background The flipped classroom approach has increased in popularity for engineering and science courses [1] [2] in part because the traditional lecture approach is perceived to be ineffective for teaching essential problem-solving skills [3]. Time spent in the classroom is thought to be better used when the instructor supports students working in groups on problem-solving and other active learning activities. While many variants of the flipped classroom approach have been described, the essential pedagogical aspects include 1) offloading the transmission of information out of the classroom for consumption before class time; 2) use of class time for active group learning; 3) preand postclass activities for students to further practice with the skills practiced in the classroom [3]. In most flipped classroom implementations, the course content is presented through video lessons accessed online and which are either prepared by the course instructors or curated from existing sources [2]. The flipped classroom approach does not prescribe to include in the online content means for the students to test their knowledge and understanding. In some reports, flipped classroom videos included formative tests [2][4]. In other studies, the online content solely presented essential knowledge, concepts, and methods of analysis, while understanding was tested at the beginning of the in-class meetings through question-andanswer sessions or with short quizzes [2] [5] [6]. Previous studies [7] reported that pre-class quizzes on the lecture material benefited students’ preparation without specifying the format to use for the quizzes (online vs. in-class, graded for participation or correctness). Other studies could not attribute a clear benefit to preparatory online quizzes [4]. The purpose of this study was to determine if including formative quizzes in the video lessons of a flipped classroom altered the students’ propensity to watch the video lessons and to prepare for the in-class activities. We examined if students participated in the online formative video quizzes and if such participation correlated with success on summative measures of performance. The starting point of the study was a course that had been taught as a flipped classroom for several years [6] such that we could attempt to isolate the effects of the online formative quizzes on student involvement and learning. Methods Context The “Medical Electronics” course at our institution is a 4-unit required course in the curriculum of our Biomedical Engineering undergraduate program with an enrollment of 45 – 50 juniors and seniors. The course offered every Spring during a 15-week semester presents the analysis and design of analog electronic functions commonly found in measurement systems and medical instruments as well as the components used to implement these functions in hardware. Students learn about sensing with medical transducers, signal amplification and signal conditioning with transistors, operational amplifiers, instrumentation amplifiers, bridge amplifiers, and active filters, as well as DC power generation and linear DC power supplies built with transformers, diode bridges, capacitors, Zener diodes, and voltage regulators. The students attend two 80 min classroom sessions and one laboratory session each week. In the laboratory, the students practice to design and implement the functions studied in the classroom [8]. To accommodate the large enrollment, two or three laboratory sessions are offered each week with comparable numbers of students in each session. The lecture part of the course has been taught with the flipped classroom instructional approach since 2014 to promote active learning by collaborative problem-solving [9] [6]. Students are assigned video lessons to watch every week that present the essential knowledge content and a few sample problems with solutions. The narrated videos (15 20 min duration) were developed with Camtasia (versions 8 and 9, Techsmith) from Powerpoint slides, which are also available to the students on the Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS) for reviews and reminders. In the classroom, for each new topic, a short discussion takes place prompted by the questions the students raise about the video lesson. The discussion is followed by a group quiz with conceptual and problem-solving questions that is used to further activate the students’ knowledge and retrieval of the lesson’s content. The answers to the group quiz are reviewed with the class, each group marking the answer sheet of a different group. The group or groups with the highest scores in the group quiz receive 1 bonus point to be applied toward the individual quiz the students take at the end of each lesson or group of lessons (equivalent to 25% of the maximum individual quiz score). The group quizzes confer a game-like atmosphere to the initial discussion of a new topic. They were adopted at the same time as the flipped classroom approach to motivate the students to watch the video lessons when each new topic is introduced. Thereafter, the students work in groups of 4 to 6 to solve problems from an assignment sheet, with the instructor and one teaching assistant roaming the room to observe how the students are addressing the problems, provide personalized hints or clarifications, identify conceptual errors, and guide the students through each exercise. Depending on the ease with which the students handle each exercise, the class agrees on the answers to the problem and proceeds to the following problem or the solution is discussed at the board with the instructor prompting the students’ groups for clarifications about their approach for solving the problem. We assess students in the course with quizzes taken individually and administered approximately every 10 days, one midterm exam, and one final exam. All the assessments are in the form of problem-solving objective questions, 4-5 questions for the quizzes, 20-25 questions for the midterm exam, and 30-35 questions for the 2-hour final exam. Intervention The LMS records automatically if the students access the video lessons in their entirety, in part, or not at all. In this way, we can track the percentage of students who access and complete the video lessons during the semester. We had observed in the previous offerings of the course that the percentage of lessons viewed by the students decreased as the semester progressed [10]. Therefore, an incentive to watch the video lessons was built into the recordings in the form of problem-solving quiz questions (3 or 4 for each lesson). The students were told that if they attempted to respond to the quiz questions, they would receive a small participation bonus applied toward their overall course score, irrespective of the correctness of their answers [11]. The quiz feature of Camtasia was used to embed the questions in the video lessons. Freeresponse and objective problem-solving questions were used, that asked the students to compute a quantity (voltage, current, gain) in a circuit presented in the background of the video image. The quiz questions addressed important methods for circuit analysis that had been presented in the video lessons in the form of detailed solved examples and problems for the students to solve on their own (only final answers provided). Thus, the quiz questions mainly examined if the students could on their own analyze circuits similar to those presented in the video lessons or expand on the lesson content to analyze a new circuit with the same methods of analysis. After each question was answered, the students received feedback indicating if they had entered the correct answer, or in the case of an incorrect answer, the correct answer, and a hint to