Flipped Classroom Concept for Industry 4.0 Pump Monitoring in Building Information Technology

Abstract

The Flipped Classroom teaching concept has already proven itself in regular school and university teaching for some time. It is already regularly used for frontal teaching, lectures, seminars, and exercises at many universities. For some time now, practical laboratory courses and projects have become the focus of digitalization. Considering distance learning in particular, solutions must be found in this field. This paper describes the didactic concept, the technical background as well as the implementation of a flipped project in the master course Building Automation. It answers the research question: "How to design didactics and implementation of a practical laboratory project on the topics of information modeling, OPC UA and Self-X capabilities using the example of pump monitoring for realizing it as a flipped classroom teaching concept for master students of Building Automation?" To answer the research question, established concepts of didactics were combined with established and new technologies. On the didactic aspect, resources and methods such as explanatory videos in the form of screencasts, competency-oriented learning objectives of different taxonomy levels and group work according to the partner-ship model are used. Combining this with technological tools and concepts, such as a GitHub Repository as reader, task collection and forum, Node-RED as low-code environment, OPC UA, information modeling and Self-X as challenging content emphasis, results in a modern and demanding Flipped Classroom teaching concept. Evaluation, student feedback and conclusion show that even high complexity practical projects can be realized as a Flipped Classroom concept on the level of a master's program. Furthermore, the project can be replicated at any time and, thanks to the manual, can in principle be carried out by any teaching staff or even other laboratories. Further work must primarily address the potential for optimization in terms of organization and content, yet the abstraction of the described project to a meta-level is also conceivable.