This paper examines the effects of hands-on learning in an undergraduate circuits class that is taught to non-majors; i.e., students outside of electrical and computing engineering. The course, ECE3710, is taught in a blended format facilitated by the video lectures prepared for two Massive Open Online Courses developed for the Coursera Platform. Because of the video content covered outside of class, the face-to-face portion of the class is enhanced with a number of active and collaborative learning techniques, including the inclusion of small-scale, mobile, hands-on labs.

The purpose of educational research is to better understand how people learn and improve student learning. Typically, this research asks what students think, such as “What is the percentage of students interested in taking courses online?” or assesses how a change in instruction affects learning, such as “Are online lectures are equally effective as face-to-face lectures?”. Your research methods will depend heavily on which of these two goals (or both) you are trying to accomplish and many other factors.

With an onslaught of many new technologies and new uses of technology in education to provide alternative methods for instructing students, many educators were left wondering when it is appropriate to use technology for instruction in higher education. A slew of research suggests the circumstances under which technology improves, maintains, or even hurts learning outcomes, but many of these studies compare the new method of instruction to a “traditional” method in which a lecturer talks at students during class time, holds office hours, and provides little additional support.

This paper describes a project where a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) was developed in order to blend a Circuits and Electronics course taught to non-majors at Georgia Tech. The MOOC platform contains videos of all the course lectures, online homework, and quizzes. Over 400 students take this course on campus each term. Since these students were spread over eight to nine sections, consistency of coverage and of grading was a major motivation for inverting this course.

The terms hybrid, blended, flipped, and inverted are inconsistently defined in the literature creating a barrier to efficient research on and implementations of these types of classes. This paper examines existing definitions of these new types of courses and uses those definitions to identify two dimensions critical to differentiating types of courses: how instruction is delivered to students and what type of instruction students receive. The paper then addresses how these dimensions were used to create a taxonomy that defines hybrid, blended, flipped, and inverted classrooms.

This study provides an empirical analysis of using online technologies and team problem solving sessions to shift an undergraduate fluid mechanics course from a traditional lecture format to a collaborative learning environment. Students were from three consecutive semesters of the same course taught by the same professor. Two treatment groups (Flipped, FlippedPlus) used different combinations of online technologies (Tegrity, WileyPlus, NetTexts).

In its American incarnation, accreditation exists because of a confluence of two otherwise unrelated historical trends. The first involved the massive outpouring of philanthropy to institutions of higher learning at the beginning of the 20th century. Shocked by the dismal state of university administration and accountability, industrialists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie demanded minimal standards as a condition for receiving grants and gifts. These were men of industry who were enamored with industrial management practices, including quality control and measurement.

There is a collapse of confidence under way in U.S. colleges and universities. It is a collapse that has been documented in what seems like a steady stream of recent reports and books, including my own. Amid the many dire warnings there is one bright thread: advances in information technology are often viewed as a pathway to rebuilding public confidence in higher education by reducing costs, expanding access, improving outcomes, and increasing financial transparency.

In recent years, states have implemented system-wide programs, including the University System of Georgia’s STEM Initiative, to enhance postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This paper presents the results of a review of the scholarly literature and a national Internet survey undertaken to develop a catalogue of state-level STEM enhancement programs, focused on program objectives, demographics, programmatic components, and outcomes.

If current economic, social, and technological trends continue, it is increasingly likely that the typical “University” of the future will not look like the present day institutional arrangement. This paper explores disruptive forces impacting the delivery of post secondary education and speculates on potential structure and impact on 21st Century Universities, focusing on approaches, partnerships, and technologies that will drive development of future venues for higher education.