Best Practices for Teaching Electrical Engineering: A 2025 ZyBooks Guide
By Dr. Yasaman Adibi and Dr. Mohsen Sarraf
Introduction: Addressing the Complexity of Modern Electrical Engineering Education
Teaching electrical engineering presents unique pedagogical challenges that have only intensified as the field has evolved. Students must simultaneously master abstract theoretical concepts, apply sophisticated mathematics, and connect both to practical applications—all while developing the problem-solving intuition essential for engineering practice.
After years of refining our approach across circuits, signals and systems, and digital image processing courses, we’ve developed strategies that significantly improve student comprehension and engagement. These methods, validated through research presented at ASEE 2024, center on interactive digital content that transforms how students visualize and internalize complex concepts.
The Fundamental Challenge: Time-Dependent Complexity
Why Traditional Methods Fall Short
Consider a typical circuits lecture on RC circuit analysis. Students must understand how circuit behavior changes when a switch opens or closes, tracking multiple variables—initial conditions, capacitor voltages—that evolve over time. Traditional board work requires extensive sketching and re-sketching of circuit states, consuming valuable lecture time while students struggle to maintain conceptual continuity.
The problem compounds in signals and systems courses. Teaching convolution traditionally requires:
- Drawing original signals
- Illustrating time-reversal
- Showing progressive sliding
- Calculating overlap regions at each step
This process routinely consumes 10-15 minutes of lecture time, with students often focusing more on copying graphs than understanding the underlying concept.
The Power of Visual Learning
Through systematic implementation of interactive animations, we’ve reduced these explanations to under two minutes while actually improving comprehension. Human cognitive processing naturally favors visual information over text or audio alone, a principle we leverage throughout our courses.
The Say-Show-Ask Pedagogical Framework
The zyBook approach structures content delivery through three integrated phases:
Say: Focused Conceptual Introduction
We present concepts concisely without sacrificing rigor. By eliminating tangential information, we help students focus on core principles before adding complexity.
Show: Interactive Visualization
Animations serve two distinct pedagogical purposes:
Process Demonstration: Step-by-step visualization of time-dependent phenomena such as capacitor charging, switch operations, or signal convolution. Students control pacing, ensuring comprehension before progression.
Progressive Complexity: Systematic unveiling of complex diagrams. For instance, resistor color band reading—traditionally presented as a dense reference table—becomes an intuitive step-by-step process where each band’s meaning is revealed sequentially.
Ask: Immediate Application and Reinforcement
Participation Activities provide ungraded practice with comprehensive feedback. Students can attempt problems unlimited times, with each answer choice—correct or incorrect—accompanied by detailed explanations. When a student incorrectly identifies a phasor containing a time variable, they don’t simply see “incorrect” but receive specific guidance: “The phasor domain representation should not contain time variables.”
Challenge Activities offer auto-graded homework that builds progressively. Students must demonstrate mastery at each level before advancing, with new problem parameters generated for each attempt. This approach accommodates different learning paces while ensuring foundational understanding.
Practical Implementation Strategies
1. Strategic Pre-Class Preparation
Our ASEE 2024 and 2025 research demonstrates that allocating just 5-10% of course grades to reading completion yields substantial improvements in overall performance. This small investment transforms classroom dynamics—students arrive with foundational knowledge, enabling deeper exploration during lecture.
Implementation Note: Emphasize completion over perfection. Students should engage with all activities but aren’t penalized for errors during initial learning phases.
2. Integrated Projection Method
We project ZyBooks content directly onto whiteboards, maintaining flexibility to annotate with additional examples. When explaining how theoretical concepts apply to practical systems—timing recovery in communications, filter design in signal processing—we write directly around the projected content. This integration creates a rich learning environment where core concepts and applications coexist naturally.
3. Data-Driven Course Management
Regular progress monitoring through CSV exports or LMS reports provides actionable insights:
- Individual student struggle points, through monitoring time spent on topics
- Class-wide challenging topics
- Time-on-task patterns
- Problem attempt frequencies
Monitoring the above metrics can provide an emphasis point or topics for review sessions either at an individual or class level.
4. Efficient Assessment Structure
Our recommended grade distribution:
- 5-10% Reading completion (reading + Participation Activities)
- 15-20% Challenge activities
- Remainder for exams and projects
This structure incentivizes consistent engagement while providing multiple low-stakes practice opportunities before high-stakes assessments.
MATLAB Integration: Seamless Theory-to-Practice Transition
Eliminating Context Switching
Professional engineering increasingly requires computational proficiency in tools like MATLAB and Python. While Python has gained significant traction across engineering disciplines, MATLAB remains particularly powerful for electrical engineering applications—especially in signal processing, control systems, and circuit analysis. Traditional approaches force students to toggle between textbook theory and separate programming environments. Embedded MATLAB Grader eliminates this cognitive disruption—students learn signal processing concepts and immediately apply them through integrated coding exercises.
Pedagogical vs. Syntactic Feedback
The distinction between compiler errors and learning feedback is critical. Traditional MATLAB returns syntax errors: “Index exceeds matrix dimensions.” Our integrated labs provide conceptual guidance: “Verify your damping coefficient calculation” or “Review the relationship between natural frequency and filter response.”
This approach maintains focus on engineering concepts while developing computational skills—we’re teaching signal processing, not just programming.
Selecting Appropriate Content for Your Program
ZyBooks offers four circuits titles tailored to different pedagogical approaches:
NI Circuits: Emphasizes theoretical foundations with detailed proofs and derivations. Ideal for rigorous programs requiring deep mathematical understanding.
Irwin’s Basic Engineering Circuit Analysis: Balances practical applications with mathematical rigor. Suited for programs prioritizing real-world problem-solving.
Circuits (Calculus-based): Appropriate for introductory courses or programs requiring condensed coverage of fundamental concepts.
Circuits (Algebra-based): Designed for non-majors or programs without calculus prerequisites, maintaining conceptual depth while reducing mathematical complexity.
Customization and Flexibility
The platform’s modularity enables precise course customization:
- Reorder chapters and/or sections to match your syllabus
- Combine sections from multiple titles
- Add instructor notes for clarification or emphasis
- Insert custom content sections for specialized topics
Measurable Outcomes
Our multi-year implementation has yielded documented improvements:
- Enhanced student self-efficacy (ASEE 2023 study)
- Improved grade distributions (ASEE 2024 research)
- Reduced office hour remediation requests
- Increased student demand for ZyBooks in subsequent courses
Perhaps most tellingly, students now specifically inquire whether other courses utilize interactive textbooks—they’ve experienced the difference and actively seek it.
Implementation Recommendations
Week 1 Foundation
- Clearly explain the participation/challenge activity structure
- Demonstrate effective animation usage
- Establish reading completion expectations
- Show students how to monitor their own progress
Ongoing Best Practices
- Maintain consistent Sunday evening progress reviews
- Adjust Monday lectures based on identified challenges
- Conduct mid-week checks for at-risk students
- Preview upcoming challenging topics on Fridays
Common Adjustments
Based on our experience, most instructors find success by:
- Starting with animations for the most time-consuming board work
- Gradually expanding interactive content usage
- Building a library of annotated examples over successive semesters
- Sharing successful strategies with departmental colleagues
Conclusion: Evolving Engineering Education
The transition to interactive digital content represents more than technological advancement—it’s a pedagogical evolution that addresses longstanding challenges in engineering education. When students can visualize time-dependent phenomena, receive immediate targeted feedback, and practice with unlimited variations, their understanding deepens measurably.
Our experience across multiple courses and cohorts confirms that these methods don’t just save time—they fundamentally improve how students learn complex engineering concepts. As we prepare engineers for an increasingly digital professional landscape, our educational methods must evolve accordingly.
The evidence from classroom implementation and formal research is clear: interactive web-natived textbooks enhance both teaching efficiency and student outcomes. We encourage colleagues to explore these approaches, starting with their most challenging topics, and experience the transformation firsthand.
Dr. Yasaman Adibi is an electrical engineering content developer and educator specializing in circuits and signal processing. Dr. Mohsen Sarraf is an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of New Haven, teaching circuits, signals and systems, and digital image processing. Their collaborative research on interactive learning in EE education has been presented at ASEE 2023 and 2024.
For additional information about implementing ZyBooks in electrical engineering courses, visit zybooks.com.
