The Flip Side of Teaching Process Design and Process Control to Chemical Engineering Undergraduates – and Completely Online to Boot

ABSTRACT

Two core courses have been given for several years to senior chemical engineering undergraduate students in flipped format, combining pre-class online preparation by the students, “class meetings” with the lecturer, and “active tutorials,” in which groups of students solve exercises. In 2020/21, the COVID-19 lockdown imposed online teaching of these courses to the 54 enrolled students. The objective of work presented in this paper is to explore the impact of the remote flipped classroom design on students' learning experience and achievements, in comparison to the regular flipped class in which only the first preparation phase was online. Because the course was taught completely online, a plethora of data was for the first time made available to support a thorough study of the course teaching protocol, including data from Panopto Analytics®, Zoom and Moodle logs, extensive self-report surveys, as well as actual learning outcomes (exam results). Statistical analyses including multivariate regression were performed to determine which factors most affect learning outcomes. The student surveys indicate that of the three class steps, the “active tutorial” gives students the most confidence in their mastery. Furthermore, analysis indicates that active students think that they benefit more than do passive students, as reflected by both self-reporting and final exam performances. The importance of underlying ability, as indicated by the GPA is a principal conclusion from the regression model, which also identifies attendance of “active tutorials” as a dominant positive effect on exam grades. Two important conclusions of our work are that the online and face-to-face versions of our flipped approach achieve indistinguishable learning outcomes and that students’ perceived confidence in their mastery is highest after the active tutorial.