Designing instructional videos and classwork activities: teaching internet of things via flipped classroom

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) applications demonstrates great potential to improve our quality of life and efficiency of business operations. Traditionally, students are taught engineering concepts in lectures. However, this may not be the most effective approach for teaching students IoT, since it can hardly allow students to gain exposure to relevant concepts, programming practices, and system-level design of a practical application. In order to help students get hands-on experience, an undergraduate course focusing on IoT application development was flipped recently: Classroom-based lectures were replaced by a series of student-paced online video lectures, and most weekly meetings were transformed into laboratory sessions facilitated by the course team. In this paper, we (1) discuss the rationale for designing the course structure and learning activities, (2) evaluate the course effectiveness through analysing students' video viewing behaviour and their project deliverables, and (3) propose future pedagogical development for scaling up students' learning.