Work in progress: Flipping the circuits classroom: The impact of pre-class reading and in-class active learning on student and instructor

There is ample evidence about the positive benefits of active learning, but lecture continues to be the prevailing pedagogy in most undergraduate engineering courses. Conventionally, students' first exposure to course content happens in the classroom, and the main goal of class time is to deliver information. This paper describes one instructor's efforts to flip that convention by shifting first exposure to occur before class, thereby allowing the integration of active learning pedagogies into the class. We hypothesize that two factors will contribute to the success of this “flipped” classroom: (1) a new digital textbook, which ensures that students prepared meaningfully for class, and (2) a flexible classroom space, which helps to facilitate in-class active learning activities and student-instructor interaction. This paper discusses data, preliminary analyses from one semester, and plans for future work that address these hypotheses.