lunch&LEARN: Carrot or stick? How to bring students back to the classroom in the MOOC age

In this talk, Jürgen Brugger, Professor of Microengineering at EPFL, will go over the different teaching formats tested in MICRO-331, a course followed by about 140 third-year Bachelor students in Microengineering. The goal of the course is to introduce the basics of cleanroom-based chip manufacturing. Originally, the course was built around classic ex cathedra lectures, supported by a written script. The hands-on component came through practical sessions in the CMI cleanroom, where students processed simple wafers.

In 2017, Brugger and colleagues developed a MOOC to open up access and show the cleanroom process in more detail, including videos filmed inside the facility, showing both manual and robotic wafer manipulation. However, as the MOOC became popular, attendance in the flipped classroom sessions dropped sharply, partly because students could access all the material online, and partly for other reasons he will discuss.

To counter this trend, in 2024 he launched Student-Led Tutorials (SLTs): small discussion groups where students take the lead through guided, graded activities. These were inspired by a model from TU/e and adapted to the EPFL framework. The early feedback has been very encouraging; students appreciate the discussions and the collaborative format. A formal study on their learning impact is now underway at EPFL.

In a way, SLTs turned out to be both the stick and the carrot: the stick because participation is graded, and the carrot because students genuinely enjoy them as lively, peer-driven learning spaces.