Use of Supplementary Online Lecture Materials in a Heat Transfer Course

Abstract

Students are often looking for internet resources to supplement college courses. Solutions manuals for course textbooks are readily (if illicitly) available and reduce the amount of time students spend outside of class actually learning to problem-solve. At the same time, the content for many courses is readily available online in many forms-some reliable, some not. There are currently valid concerns about both of these trends; related to the ability of students to solve problems independently and the quality of the information they may find online (due to poor information literacy). Pencasts® provide a way to have students become familiar with course content outside of class, leaving more time in class for problem-solving exercises and discussion and explanation of lecture materials. A Pencast® consists of a video that displays the written work of the instructor with overlayed audio explanations; this is accomplished with a smartpen and a notebook with small, closely-spaced dots (dot paper). The smartpen records the audio and captures the pen movements as written on the dot paper. The resulting videos can be used for lecture content, example problems, demonstration of a process, or course announcements. Pencasts® allow quick production of schematics, equations, and sketches (with accompanying audio) which have been much more difficult to produce. We have begun to implement the following strategy in a senior level course in heat transfer: use of Pencasts, including lecture and examples, as the "homework" outside of class and use of student problemsolving with immediate feedback in class. The results of the initial implementation of this strategy are reported, including results of the pre/post Heat Transfer Concept Inventory (HTCI).

Targeted flipped classroom technique applied to a challenging topic

“…Flipped classrooms have been previously discussed in literature [4], and their advantages have been documented. Mason et al [5] showed that flipped classrooms allowed for more material to be covered, allowed for students to perform equivalently or better than those receiving traditional instruction, and were able to adapt quickly to the technique after initial struggles.…”