Flipping Surveying and Construction Layout

his project seeks to improve the level of student performance through implementing elements of flipped classroom techniques. Through the production and dissemination of online tutorials, students will engage in training tutorials and course content prior to attending lab and lecture/discussion sessions thereby improving their basis for understanding material delivered during face-to-face meetings. Course concepts will be introduced to the students through various media, then reinforced in the classroom and lab environment. Current barriers to student success include difficulty in translating theoretical concepts discussed in class to physical layout and measurement exercises in lab. Further student readiness barriers include a lack of understanding of the underlying concepts of geometry and trigonometry pertinent to surveying and layout activities. Curricular and Pedagogical barriers to student success are mostly related to the necessary allocation of lecture and lab time to explaining the setup and use of the surveying equipment. Use of the equipment is absolutely critical to the success of the students in this course. Lecture and discussion sessions result in a physical layout exercise in the field during the weekly lab sessions. Lab activities simply cannot be performed without the appropriate equipment. Given the equipment-intensive nature of the lab, a significant amount of lab (and sometimes lecture) time is devoted to teaching students how to set-up and use the equipment. This often results in a scenario in which students spend much of the lab session focused on the “how” of setting up and using the equipment rather than focusing the “why” and developing an understanding of the practical application of the theories and principles discussed in lecture. This course redesign seeks to provide training and tutorial videos to the students in an online format. To ensure student participation and in order to provide instantaneous feedback, students will complete an online quiz after viewing the videos and prior to the related class. In-class time that would have otherwise been spent explaining the topics of the video will instead be used to hold a student-led review and/or discussion of the pertinent concepts of the video tutorial.