Teaching Tip: The Flipped Classroom.

TLDR: Adding to the debate, a recent study concludes that students who engage in open-ended exploration first outperformed those who used traditional textbook materials first, and implies that video lectures and textbooks should come after exploration, and not before (Plotnikoff, 2013).

Abstract: 1. INTRODUCTION In a traditional instructor-centered classroom, the teacher delivers lectures during class time and gives students homework to be done after class. In a flipped, or inverted, classroom, things are done the other way round: the teacher "delivers" lectures before class in the form of pre-recorded videos, and spends class time engaging students in learning activities that involve collaboration and interaction. Passive learning activities such as unidirectional lectures are pushed to outside class hours, to be replaced with active learning activities in class. The term "inverted classroom" appeared in the literature as early as 2000 (Lage, Platt and Treglia, 2000) and was made popular by Chemistry teachers Bergmann and Sams in recent years (Bergmann and Sams, 2012, 2012a). With successful similar implementations of web-based lecture technologies--the often quoted success stories being the Khan Academy and Massive Open Online Courses--the flipped classroom gained traction at educational institutions in North America across a spectrum of disciplines and at different levels of instruction. This pedagogy has also been consistently rated as one of the top trends in educational technology (for example, Watters, 2012). Some educators have reported lower failure rates (Michigan Radio, 2013), greater flexibility, lesser stress (NBC, 2013), improved student attitudes and even better test scores (Flipped Learning Network, 2012) for classes that adopted this model. However, being a relatively new trend, most implementations of the flipped classroom are reported in blogs, online magazines and newspapers instead of academic papers and conferences. There seems to be little rigorous research done to measure the effects of this pedagogy (Goodwin and Miller, 2013), and what has been published so far seems far from conclusive. Whilst a 3-year long study of flipped learning for a pharmaceutics course reported a 5.1% improvement in student performance (Meyer, 2013), contradictory preliminary data from another 3-year study at Harvey Mudd College suggest that flipping may not cause any difference in student outcomes (Atteberry, 2013). Adding to the debate, a recent study (Schneider, Wallace, Blikstein and Pea, 2013) concludes that students who engage in open-ended exploration first outperformed those who used traditional textbook materials first, and implies that video lectures and textbooks should come after exploration, and not before (Plotnikoff, 2013). Despite the controversy, this pedagogy's raising popularity has motivated the author to run a trial on a class of 46 Information Systems (IS) undergraduates during a special term in 2013. The course that this class was taking is a second course in programming that covered object-oriented design and advanced programming. In previous years, this course was usually conducted in "interactive seminar" style: instructors taught a new concept and reinforced what they had just taught via short hands-on programming exercises performed on students' laptops. Instructors then moved on to the next concept and the cycle was repeated. Longer programming exercises would then be given as optional homework that could be submitted for feedback from teaching assistants. Whilst such interactive seminars were more effective than traditional monologue-style lectures (Steinert and Snell, 1999), the author observed that some students were still not engaged. Many students were updating their Facebook pages during the teaching sessions. Students who visited the washroom could miss a critical part of the lecture. Slower students who had difficulty picking up the concepts during the "first parse" were consequently unable to successfully complete the hands-on exercises that followed. For these students, the course rapidly snowballed into a vicious cycle of disengagement, poor performance, lack of confidence, and further disengagement. It was hoped that the flipped classroom could increase students' engagement with the content and improve their overall experience with the course. …