Work in Progress: First Experiences with a Flipped Online Statistics Classroom for Engineering Students

Abstract

Unmotivated students, acting as passive consumers, wanting to pass the exam with the least possible effort, is a common problem in basic statistics courses in undergraduate engineering education. Our course in statistics for industrial engineering students is also affected by this passivity problem. One additional issue in this course is that it is part of the study program Industrial Engineering Online, i.e. the tuition of the course takes place online, which can even more strengthen the passivity problem. Therefore, we decided to introduce active learning components in the teaching framework of the course. This paper describes the challenges and opportunities we encountered, when we flipped the online classroom in order to encourage the students to become more active learners and at the same time, hopefully, feel more motivated to take the basic statistics course.