Efficacy of a Flipped Method in an Undergraduate Class at IIT Bombay

This study analyses the effectiveness of teaching an undergraduate process control course in a flipped mode, with a constraint that the students do not have to do more work than in a conventional class. Video lectures delivered by the instructor in the past were used as study material. It was supplemented by classroom and LMS based discussions, a virtual lab, and tutorial sessions. To enforce the watching of video lectures, a weekly quiz was conducted. Assessments were also carried out through three longer forms of quiz, a mid-semester examination and an end-semester examination. The performance of the students was evaluated using the following metrics: (1) Perception analysis of the flipped class students. (2) A limited comparison of the performance of the flipped class students (experimental group) with a similar set of students who underwent a conventional course simultaneously (control group) (3) Studying the consistency of the flipped class students' performance over different evaluation criteria and correlations between them. The results are consistent with each other and the performance is good. An overwhelming majority of the flipped class students (about 80%) also perceive the flipped method to be as effective as or better than the conventional method of teaching. As it helps achieve the benefits of a flipped method, simultaneously with high satisfaction levels, this method can be considered as successful and hence is easily implementable, even in large scale.