The Attractiveness of Reversing Teaching Forms – Feedback on an Electrical Engineering Course

Abstract

The transformation of teaching practices in universities remains necessary to better motivate, involve and promote the success of increasingly "connected" students. These new practices can be off-putting to teachers because of the complexity of their implementation. New practices, such as those in the in-verted/flipped classroom model, which consists of reversing the nature of in-classroom and out-of-class activities, are well documented in the pedagogical literature; however, few empirical studies are available that allow us to objec-tively analyze their effect on student learning. As such, university teachers are not being encouraged to change their traditional pedagogical practices. This manuscript proposes a rather simple method, which draws on but is not directly equivalent to the inverted classroom model. The aim here is to re-verse the traditional pedagogical sequence of “Lectures; Tutorials; then Prac-tical work”. This mode of teaching is still very popular in the university sys-tem, particularly in France. More precisely, in the proposed model, teaching begins with practical work, followed by tutorials and finishing with lectures that offer time for questions and debates. This method places much more importance on collaborative working and the consolidation of students’ knowledge and skills. An online course platform called Celene has been widely used to support student learning and to maximize teacher-learner in-teractions. The proposed approach was tested with students of an electrical engineering course in their final year of engineering school. A full six-year feedback period is discussed to demonstrate the interactivity and effective-ness of the approach. The results of the various experiments carried out show that this method “smooths” out some of the difference in student competence. In particular, it is a powerful remediation approach to restore energy to students, who sometimes feel overwhelmed by the traditional ap-proach, which is very transmissive. As a result, the proposed method signifi-cantly reduces failure rates.