A Master of Science thesis in Engineering Systems Management by Raghad Mohd Omar Nihlawi entitled, “Investigating the Impact of the Flipped Method on Undergraduate and Graduate Students at AUS”, submitted in November 2018. Thesis advisor is Dr. Hazim El-Baz and thesis co-advisor is Dr. Cindy Gunn. Soft and hard copy available.
The main driver of this research is the continuous high demand of improving the teaching and learning experience in higher education so students are meeting their learning needs, and developing the needed skills for the workforce. Flipped learning is one of the pedagogies that aims to address this improvement where the students review content before the class, while the class time is devoted to activities such as problem solving and discussions. There are few initiatives by some instructors who are applying the flipped methodology at AUS in the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The objective of this research is to investigate the impact of the flipped method on the students’ perceived learning experience at AUS, in addition to provding a comparison with the lecture-based method regarding both the students’ perceived learning experience and their academic performance. Furthermore, this study looks into the factors contributing mostly to the impact of the flipped method. The research purpose will be addressed by investigating the flipped classes in addition to selected lecture-based ones, adopting the Revised Community of Inquiry framework (RCOI) to assess students’ perceptions of their learning experience, and comparing the students’ academic performance to look for any significance difference as a possible result of the teaching methodology. The study showed that students’ perceptions for the flipped method were mainly related to the nature of the course and the use of pre-class videos, where students in the technical courses with pre-class videos, and in the conceptual courses in the absence of pre-class videos, had reported significantly higher satisfaction compared to students in the technical courses in the absence of pre-class videos with a p-value ≤ 0.025. Furthermore, students in the technical courses with pre-class videos had outperformed their peers in the lecture-based classes regarding academic performance with a p-value ≤ 0.057 and estimated course grade median deference of 0.3. The outcome of this research helps instructors to decide on future pedagogies to apply in their classes in addition to showing 10 recommendations to be considered in the design of future flipped courses.