Flipping the Automotive Class in a Vocational College

摘要

Considering the expectation of today's competitive work-life, higher education organizations are in search of new possibilities to create student-centered and practice-based learning environments. As an answer, flipped or inverted classrooms are drawing great attention as a pragmatic instructional design. Flipped classrooms are getting more and more common since they have ease-use of technologic tools like forums and digital videos. Additionally, they support student centered learning by routing them to prepare at home and come class with pre-knowledge. However, there is limited rigorous research about possible effects of this pedagogy on academic outputs like test scores or course credits of students. To fill this gap and create alternative course design for vocational colleges, we intended to design an automotive technology course (diesel engine technology) using flipped classroom pedagogy. We tried flipped classrooms through six weeks using quasi experimental research methodology. Although they have the same pretest scores, experiment group outperformed control group in both open-ended exam scores and hand skill based tasks.