That flipping classroom - getting engineering students to be consciously competent on their own

This paper is inspired by the Keynote Speech which I gave at ITHET 2014 in York in September 2014. The material was very well received, and it seemed appropriate to offer it for publication in the proceedings of ITHET 2015. In preparing this Keynote Speech I was reminded of the “Spectral Lines” article by Donald Christiansen. He was a famous editor of IEEE Spectrum. The article was entitled “Do students really get it?” The 80:20 Rule: What he was really referring to was the difficulty many students in engineering have in grasping difficult threshold subjects. Some estimates suggest that the 80:20 rule applies. 20% get it, and 80% muddle through. What should we be doing about it? Does it really matter?: We still manage to produce enough technically competent engineers to push our society forward (or do we?) Can we really improve that 80:20 rule to perhaps 50:50? Is it our responsibility as educators to be doing that? Is it not perhaps the students who should be taking the responsibility for their own learning. In this paper I am going to explore how we can perhaps do it by changing our teaching style.