Using Recorded Lectures and Low Stakes Online Quizzes to Improve Learning Efficiency in Undergraduate Engineering Courses.

STEM disciplines, especially at research universities, have been measurably slow to integrate online modalities into undergraduate classes. Current and future students are now "digital natives" interacting with the world and absorbing information in a very "YouTube" style, characterized by short, on-demand, and entertaining chunks of information. Faculty have been reticent to adopt what they perceive to be unproven technologies while administrators often are unable to allow faculty extra time or budget to investigate the efficacy of new approaches to teaching. This paper describes the results of experiments designed to help improve this situation by accessing the effectiveness of two key online modalities that are often the easiest first steps for faculty to adopt and can be very effective in improving the operational effectiveness and learning outcomes of the course: Recorded lectures and Online Quizzes. Recorded lectures and Quizzes were integrated into two undergraduate engineering courses. The two courses were a sophomore level Dynamics class and a senior level Finite Element Analysis course. The Dynamics course is required and the enrollments range from 160-360, and the Finite Element Analysis course is an elective with enrollments between 60-80. In the Dynamics course, recorded lectures were often used in place of the live lecture and the in-class lecture time was often "flipped" and used for discussion and interaction rather than a traditional one-way lecture. In the Finite Element Analysis course, the lectures were recorded and made available to the students prior to the in-class version of the lecture. Quizzes were designed as an assessment tool (rather than purely for grading) aimed at "real time" feedback. This allowed both students and instructors to measure the learning achievements in the previous week of the course and let the instructor modify the subsequent week's lectures accordingly. The results show that student-reported learning efficiency improves when recorded lectures are utilized. This was the case whether the class period was subsequently used to teach a similar lecture or if lecture time was flipped to provide more interactive discussion based learning. The availability of recorded lectures prior to class did not affect students' decision to attend class. Students reported that having weekly "low stakes" quizzes and reviewing them in class helped them understand key concepts better. These results provide more evidence of an ever increasing amount of data that supports the learning efficiency gains that can be attained using a variety of hybrid course pedagogy and online learning modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]