A Flipped Classroom Setting Trial in GIS Course

Abstract GIS is one of the powerful tools civil engineers can implement in design, planning, surveying, mapping, risk management etc. At our institution the civil engineering students take this required two-credit course during their freshman year. In this course student learn basic principles, methods and applications of GIS and learn to operate the software. The GIS skills from this course can be applicable in several upcoming classes across the undergraduate civil curriculum such as freshman design, water resources, hydrology, senior designs etc. as well as during student's internships and future employment. Historically, this course has always been taught in a traditional lecture-based format in our department. Teaching this software-based course in traditional lecture-based format consumes a significant portion of class time on merely being familiar with software, limiting the time that can be dedicated to software's real world application aspect. This minimizes the benefits that the students could have gained from this course. Revising this course into a non-traditional format by utilizing teaching resources such as recorded video lectures, handouts, useful YouTube videos etc. in flipped classroom settings could be used to improve the quality of course content. The goal of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of flipped setting for the GIS course so that the instructors serve as learning guides rather than learning leaders. Flipped class setting creates room to use face-to-face class time for quality discussions and worktime on projects/ assignments. Student's understanding in this new course settings will be evaluated from project/ assignment grade, course evaluations and focus groups. The preliminary result from partial flip setting of this class suggests that 93% of the students feel confident about the content before coming to the class to work on in-class assignments.