Flipping the Capstone Process Design Course

Abstract This paper describes a flipped version of the capstone design course taken by all of the 4th Year Chemical Engineering undergraduate students (approximately 90 students each year). This course was the first 100% flipped class at the Technion, and at the time of writing, is has now been given three times in flipped format. In the implemented course, each week of activity involves three sequential elements: (a) Students watch on-line lectures at home; (b) They then attend a class meeting, in which the lecturer expands on materials they have learned alone, as well as engaging them in active learning techniques such as open-ended problem solving; (c) They then participate an active tutorial, in which they solve exercises on their own or in teams with their peers. Classroom experience with the flipped-class approach indicates that overall, students came to class and to the tutorials far better prepared than with the conventional version of the course. Furthermore, the performance of the students in the final exam has been significantly improved.