Opportunities of digital teaching in process control: flip the classroom, provide a level playing field, and integrate external experts

Abstract

After serval periods of remote teaching in the COVID-19 pandemic, many academic institutions are working on concepts to transfer the lessons learned about digital teaching into their didactic concepts. In this paper, we present a didactic concept for courses with student groups of heterogenous educational background. It is based on a self-paced learning phase with self-study materials, a flipped classroom session for interactive problem solving in interdisciplinary student groups, an exercise session for more complex problems, and a student project. An important key feature is that (1) the students can learn according to their educational background in the self-paced learning stage and teach each other in the other parts of the course. Additional features are (2) the maximized share of the student-staff contact time spent on cooperative problem solving and (3) the collaborative development of teaching materials with external experts. The concept was implemented within our course on process control. The results are illustrated via the example of a digital teaching module for hybrid semi-parametric modeling.