156 A. Brandt and C. Kjær 14.2 Motivation Traditional teaching often results in lectures that are spent by the lecturer giving an overview of the subject, perhaps highlighting some of the points that, based on experience, are known to be difficult for the students. Exercises are usually left for the students’ to work on by their own, or passed on to some special classes—many times conducted by less experienced teachers or PhD students. This means that the time for the professor to use his/her special competences in explaining unclear things to the students is limited. In addition, for many students, the efficiency of learning by listening alone is poor. Thus, the effective learning can many times be rather low. Alternative teaching techniques, which incorporate more of the students’ senses and which are activating the students more, are desirable. The flipped classroom concept is addressing these very issues with teaching. By letting the students prepare before the class, by watching one or more videos with the lecture, and reading the corresponding text in the text book, the class time can be used for discussions, problem solving, and in-depth explanations of concepts perceived as difficult by the students. This is also using the professor’s competences more efficiently, since the professor can focus on discussing the more difficult and advanced parts of the topic, rather than spending time on the lighter content. There are several challenges in implementing the flipped classroom. It is well-known that many students are not very motivated to work during the entire semester, but rather focus their work load to the end of the semester up to the exams. This behavior or learning culture needs to be changed for the flipped classroom concept to work properly. In addition, students have to be motivated to actually watch the videos and read the textbook before the lecture, to show up well prepared for the class discussions. Next, the lectures have to be planned and exercises suitable to be used for the purpose of focusing on the highlights of the topic are to be designed. 14.3 Organization The present class on experimental vibration analysis consists of twelve lectures of four hours each, and eight home assignments. The course is running over a full semester in a two-semesters-per-year system. In the pilot class that was taught using the new concept, there were eight students on master’s level. Since the flipped classroom concept is new, at least to the students that were exposed to the class described here, in the first class, the principles were pointed out and the students were given an overview of the new study technique that they were supposed to use. Several methods for motivating students to prepare well before class has been tried in conjunction with flipped classroom teaching [3]. To address this issue for the present course, each class (except the first one for obvious reasons) starts by asking multiple-choice questions (MCQs), where the students use clickers to respond. The teacher and students thus get feedback on how many of the students are giving the different alternatives as the correct answer. This is motivating the students to work pre class, because they typically feel embarrassed if they do not successfully answer the questions. Five to seven multiple choice questions with four alternative answers to each question were used for each class. There are many clicker systems available on the market. For the present class, the web based system by Poll Everywhere (See www.polleverywhere.com), was used because it has the advantage that the students can use their cell phones, laptops, or tablets to respond, and thus there is no need for any additional hardware clickers. An account can be created where the questions can be entered and organized for each class. If the lecturer so wishes, the questions can be incorporated into PowerPoint presentations, although this was not done for the present class. After the MCQs were answered, a short summary of the topic of the lecture was presented by a few PowerPoint slides, to trigger a discussion of details of the lecture topic. The idea with this is that by addressing the same issue several times (through the video, the textbook, and again in class) with slightly different angles, the students are more likely to come to a thorough understanding, and at least some of the angles will make more sense to each student, but not the same angles for each student. The next part of the class consisted of the lecturer presenting several smaller problems, for the students to solve within 15–30 min for each problem. After giving the students the time to try to solve each question, a discussion of the answers was instigated, and the student’s presented and discussed their different solutions. The last 30–60 min of each class were used to go through the home assignment for the coming week, and for the students to start working on it. This was partly done because the assignments used were designed before turning the class into a flipped classroom class, and therefore the assignments required more time than the students had available, now that they also
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