14 Flipping the Classroom for a Class on Experimental Vibration Analysis 157 had to watch videos etc. prior to each class. Therefore the home assignments were made easier for the students by giving some hints on how to best solve them, and highlighting the difficulties and their principle solution. 14.4 Lecturer’s Experience The first experience is that videos take a very long time to record; at least it did for the first author. Videos were designed as talk-over to PPT slides. This format was chosen over having more authentic lectures where the lecturer is teaching, because it is believed to be more focused for the students watching. This format does, however, probably need a narrator capable of keeping the voice interesting otherwise the student may lose concentration through boredom. It should also be mentioned that the slides from each video were given to students prior to each class by putting PDF files on the class web site, so students could view the slides together with watching the videos. In the present case, the videos were recorded and put on YouTube [6], by adding a channel with a playlist. By making the videos public, copyright issues become a matter, so the slide presentations have to be rid of any copyrighted material not owned by the author, or permission has to be sought. In the present case this was not an issue, and it was considered an advantage to have the videos publicly available to all readers of the textbook [5]. It turned out that students came prepared to class, however it also turned out that the pre-class learning could have been better, which was discovered by the MCQs often resulting in incorrect responses. This could indicate that the course content is difficult to understand (as is well known that signal and vibration analysis is for many students) and is not necessarily meaning that the result of the flipped classroom was not working. The result has to be evaluated at the end of the course. To increase the outcome of the students’ self-learning during preparing for the class, next time the course is taught, the home assignments will be modified to allow them to be solved before class, as an example of just-in-time teaching [Mazur]. These assignments will then be used as the base for the discussions in class. Class exercises also took a long time to prepare and will be modified for the second time this class is taught, but this is probably normal to do for any lecturer. The exercises have to be well designed in order to cover as much of the course content as possible, and they have to be possible to solve in the short time available. By changing the concept used in the present class as explained in the previous paragraph, this will likely be positively addressed. The overall experience is that the flipped classroom technique was very hard to develop, but that it worked satisfactorily. Also, the second time, there will be more time for the lecturer to prepare the in-class discussions and home assignments, now that the videos are recorded. 14.5 Students’ Experience At the end of the course, the second author of the present paper conducted interviews with the eight students of the class. Overall, the students’ experiences of the flipper learning design were surprisingly positive. The most important experiences reported by the students, who all experienced a flipped classroom class for the first time, will be presented in this Section. We tried to investigate the following points in the interviews. • How did the students experience using the videos to prepare before the class? • How did the students use, or work with, the videos? • How did the students experience the classes in this new teaching style? 14.5.1 The Students’ Experience with the Videos The question “How did you like using videos to prepare for class?” was answered very positively. Among the comments from students was “It gave me a different freedom: : : which means you can get answers to some questions before you go to class. I felt much better prepared for the classes we had than I normally do. It also meant that the lectures we had were used more for deeper discussions about some examples and stuff.” [Student] In this quote the student reflects both the experience of being better prepared, and that there are more time to work (in class) on some examples. Another student expressed it differently:
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