Designing a flipped classroom in an industrial engineering master subject

Résumé

Flipped classroom is a methodology based on delivery instructional content, often online, outside of the classroom. The flipped classroom is able to explore topics in greater depth and creates meaningful learning opportunities and because of that it was applied in “Chemical Process Design” lectures, corresponding to the first course of the Master of Industrial Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering of Bilbao at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). This course has 3 ECTS distributed on master classes (15 hours), computer lessons (9 hours), and seminars (6 hours). There are four different groups and it is taught in three different languages (English, Basque and Spanish). The main objective of this course is to provide students with the fundamentals, techniques and technologies applied in the field of chemical process design. This course is evaluated by continuous and final assessments. In the continuous assessment, students design and simulate a chemical process using a chemical process simulator as Aspen Plus. In this simulator, 6 different topics are studied: basic management, thermodynamics properties analyzing, reactors and kinetic parameters, distillation, processes simulation, and sensitivity and parameters optimization. This is the first time students work with this software, and they should design the chemical process receiving only 9 hours of face to face computer lessons. In the previous academic years, different problems regarding the learning internalization of the practical skill of this simulator were detected. Due to that, the knowledge that could be taught in this computer classes was quite limited. To improve the skills students learn about the simulator, different video lessons were prepared. Video lessons were prepared for five out of the six topics. The methodology employed in them was flipped classroom with the videos and traditional computer lesson; while in the distillation topic traditional lesson was only used. The aim of this work is to analyze the effect of the video lessons in the students learning needs. To analyze the effect of the flipped classroom, two different questionnaires were developed. One was performed before starting the computer lessons and the other one after finishing their chemical design process. The students’ marks of this academic course were also analyzed and compared to the previous ones where flipped classroom was not employed. In general, the acceptation of the video lessons was greatly nice, because they have a tool that can be used any time, and it is complementary to the practical lessons. In fact, in the case of the topics with video lessons, after the practice lessons, almost a 70% of the students felt totally secure about the knowledge of this topics, while without a video lessons only a 32%. This is in good agreement with the previous work made at home by the students; the use of this kind of methodology favors this work. The video lessons favors also the deepness of the practical lessons, in the present academic year it was added a new topic, the distillation one. Although a new topic was added the developed works by the student were in general better than those performed the previous academic years, therefore the obtained marks were also better. Hence, it seems that the flipped classroom is an effective tool for the knowledge internalization in the area of chemical process simulator.