2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The delivery format of college and university courses lies on a spectrum with live face-to-face at one end, asynchronous virtual delivery at the other, and all other hybrid formats between them. Each delivery format has different affordances, with asynchronous online lectures providing an opportunity for increased flexibility in accommodating students schedules and the ability to pause and rewatch lectures at their own pace. However, this format does not afford interactions between instructor and students which limits adapting a lesson to individual questions and student feedback in real-time. With a broad array of delivery formats available it is important to evaluate how student performance is impacted by the choice of format.

Research on this topic often evaluates student performance between sections of the same course that has been offered in different formats. This is incredibly useful for evaluating student learning during the course but does not provide details to evaluate if there are differences in long-term retention related to the course format. It is this specific gap that motivates this work.

At the University of Alabama a microcomputers course has been delivered in two modalities (traditional lecture style and flipped-style) during the same semesters for multiple years. These courses cover the same topics and use the same laboratory experiments (but have different homework and tests which limits comparing student performance between formats). After completing this course students can take embedded systems and computer architecture technical electives. These electives only have one section with a single instructor and is always taught using a traditional lecture style. This provides an opportunity to evaluate if there are differences in students’ performance in the technical electives based on the format (traditional or flipped) of the pre-requisite course they took.

This work will provide a quantitative comparison of student overall performance in the microcomputers course based on semester/format and a comparison of student performance in the embedded systems when grouped by pre-requisite format. The aim is to evaluate if the flipped style course leads to improved retention and performance in a follow-up technical elective than the traditional style format. These details are expected to help other engineering educators and departments in evaluating how delivery format may impact student performance both within a course and in follow-up course, which could support wider plans for curriculum design within a department beyond single courses.