Flipped Classroom – An Innovative Methodology for Effective Teaching Learning Process

 

Divyashree M

Assistant Professor, Guruvayurappan Institute of Management, Coimbatore -641105

 

ABSTRACT:

Learning is about a change: the change brought about by developing a new skill, understanding a scientific law, changing an attitude. The change is not merely incidental or natural in the way that our appearance changes as we get older. Learning is a relatively permanent change, usually brought about intentionally.  It is an accepted fact that teachers are usually not born but made. Good teachers nurture their knowledge and skills through constant and deliberate efforts. One of the pre-requisite to be good teacher is to understand the teaching learning process in more depth. This facilitates better appreciation of the teaching profession as well as the process of imparting education.

This paper is intended to give an insight into the concept of Flipped Classroom which is an innovative methodology for effective teaching learning process. It transforms the traditional way of teaching that is teachers as sage on stage to innovative way of teaching that is teachers as guide on side. Introducing flipped classroom engages and focuses students’ learning by combining active, student –centered learning with content mastery that can be applied in the real world.

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION:

In today’s education world, students drive change in learning environments around the world. The technology, with which digital natives matured, has induced students to “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. For decades, educators and educational researchers have questioned the effectiveness of teaching methods that are entirely lecture-based. Despite innovations in technology enabling alternative techniques for pedagogy, lecture formats continue to be the primary method for teaching students.

 

Educators and researchers have come to recognize the “complexities of teaching learning for understanding as opposed to just knowledge retention. They realized that they must shift from teaching –centered paradigm toward a learner-centered paradigm. It can be possible only through effective teaching learning methodology that is Flipped Classroom. This model assigns the class lecture or instructional content as home work and makes students to utilize the time in class to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning. With internet access widely available on most college and university campuses, students may view web-based instruction on their own time, at their own pace. It provides opportunities to utilize the classroom for the application of information addressed in the online lecture.

 

Since students have viewed the lecture prior to class, contact hours can be devoted to problem solving, skill development and gaining a deeper understanding of the subject matter. The teacher is able to provide students with wide range of learner-centered opportunities in class for greater teacher-to-student mentoring and peer-to-peer collaboration, increasing the possibilities to engage students in teaching learning process.

 

Flipped Classroom:

Flipped classroom is a form of blended learning in which students learn content online by watching video lectures, usually at home, and homework is done in class with teachers and students discussing and solving questions. Teacher interaction with students is more personalized - guidance instead of lecturing. This is also known as backwards classroom, inverted classroom and reverses teaching.

 

It is an instructional strategy that can provide educators with a way of minimizing the amount of direct-instruction in their teaching practice while maximizing one-to-one interaction. This strategy leverages technology providing additional supporting instructional material for students that can be accessed online which frees up classroom time that had previously been used for lecturing.

 

History Of Flipped Classroom:

In 2004, Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams started teaching at Woodland Park High School in Woodland Park, Colorado. Jon came from Denver and Aaron from Southern California.. They both developed a friendship and realized that they had very similar philosophies of education. To make their lives easier they began planning their Chemistry lessons together, and to save time they divided up much of the work. Aaron would set up one lab and Jon the next. Aaron would write the first test and Jon the next.

 

One of the problems they noticed right away about teaching in a relatively rural school is that many of their students missed a lot of school due to sports and activities. The nearby schools are not nearby. Students spent an inordinate amount of time on buses traveling to and from events. Thus, students missed their classes and struggled to stay caught up.

 

And then one day their world changed. Aaron was thumbing through a technology magazine and showed Jon an article about some software that would record a PowerPoint slide-show including voice and any annotations, and then it converted the recording into a video file that could be easily distributed online. As they discussed the potential of such software they realized this might be a way for our students who missed class to not miss out on learning. So in the spring of 2007, they began to record their live lessons using screen capture software. They posted their lectures online so that the students could access them. When they both did this YouTube was just getting started and the world of online video was just in its infancy.

 

Jonathan received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching while being the sage on the stage and Aaron received the same award under the Flipped model.

 

Figure 1: The Flipped Classroom Framework:

 

LITERATURE REVIEW:

Ø  Bergmann Overmyer and Wilie (2015), the traditional definition of a flipped classroom is replacing direct instruction with videos and encouraging students to focus on important learning activities with their teachers inside the classroom. It is argued that there is misinformation about the flipped classroom and this misinformation can be clarified by defining the flipped classroom as personalized education where students take responsibility of their own learning. In addition, the flipped classroom allows the teacher to be a facilitator and also increase interaction and personalized contact time between teachers and students.

Ø  The flipped classroom is also explained as creating problem-based learning inside the class and replacing direct instruction with videos in order to provide instructional content to be accessed whenever and wherever it is required by students. (Bergmann and Sams, 2012; Hamdan, McKnight, McKnight, and Arfstrom, 2013).

Ø  Davies, Dean and Ball (2013) also noted improvements in learning for students in the flipped classroom version of a spread- sheet course. They however, identified the short duration of their class (5 weeks) as a limitation and called for further research on the use the flipped classroom approach in IT teaching.

Ø  Lage, Platt and Treglia (2000) stated that with the use of new learning technologies it is possible to move lectures which traditionally take place inside the classroom to outside the classroom and learning activities which occur outside the classroom to inside the classroom with the guidance of the instructor.

Ø  Flipped teaching is a pedagogical approach to blended learning where classroom activities and homework are interchanged (Tucker, 2012).

Ø  Enfield (2013) explained that students are encouraged to move out of the classroom to learn anytime and anywhere by flipped classroom approach. The most useful study strategy can be chosen and used by students while moving at their own pace through the instruction.

Ø  Strayer (2012) posits that “the regular and systematic use of interactive technology” (p. 172) makes flipped classroom models unique, countering a critique that flipped classroom models are not new because teachers have always relied upon readings, and computer assisted instructions to prepare students for in-class activities.

Ø  Williams (2002) provided a literature review study on the use of internet-based technologies in higher education, concentrating on the key issues and existing problems when transferring courses to an electronic learning environment. The study indicated the requirements of future research concerning teaching and learning on electronic learning environments.

 

The study of flipped classrooms was based on the theory of Bloom's revised taxonomy of cognitive domain. This taxonomy provides six levels of learning. The explanation is arranged from the lowest level to the highest level:

 

 

Figure 2: Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy for Flipped Classroom

 

Table 1: Difference between Traditional Classroom and Flipped Classroom

Level of   Learning	Traditional Classroom Tools	Flipped Classroom Tools
Remembering	Face-to-face lecture	Pre-recorded lecture, reading material, and watching video lectures independently
Understanding	Question and Answer	Reflection, peer-to-peer discussion and collaboration
Analyzing	Homework	Classroom activities such as a group discussion
Applying, Evaluating, Creating	Homework or nothing	Student projects, presentations, peer-evaluation and instructor-evaluation.

 

Growth of Flipped Classroom:

Flipped Classroom is an academic model in which the typical homework and lecture elements of a course are changed. Students can view class related lecture videos for preparation before the class is started. This class related video lecture is the key ingredient of the flipped classroom and these are the videos mainly created by the instructor and uploaded online or it can be selected from an online repository.

 

The key factor driving the market of flipped classroom is increasing demand of individual faculty among the students for better education. Students are looking for lecture videos prior to the class which can help them in reducing time to understand the subjects. The availability of the videos allows the students to rewind, pause and play videos numerous times, which helps them to understand the concepts clearly at their own pace. This factor acts as a trigger, boosting the market for flipped classroom and is expected to witness a significant growth during the forecast period.

 

By geography, the global flipped classroom market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific Middle East and Africa. The North American flipped Classroom held the largest market share in 2016 and is expected to hole its position during the forecast period. Owing to its developed economic condition and rising awareness and adoption of advanced technology is growing the market growth of flipped classroom. North America, followed by Europe, is expected to become the second largest revenue generating region for flipped classroom market in 2016.

 

The Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest-growing region in the flipped classroom market. The growth is due to rising adoption of flipped classroom solution among students. Middle East and Africa has shown a remarkable growth in flipped classroom followed by Latin America in recent years.

 

Benefits of Flipped Classroom:

1.       Students Get Help on Difficult Topics:

One of the challenges in a traditional classroom, when instruction is delivered through a lecture, is that students are often sent home to apply what they have learned without any assistance. At home students can often get and cannot complete the assigned homework. At this point the students have a number of options. They can spend hours wrestling with an assignment they are not prepared to do, give up, call a friend, ask the teacher the next day, or in the worst case, cheat. In a flipped classroom, the work done at home is simply to view a video, and when the student is struggling with what was traditionally sent home as homework, the teacher is present to help because this higher-order thinking is done in class.

 

2.       The Teacher-Student Interaction Is Enhanced:

The teacher stands at the front of the class and delivers content. When done well, this can be a rich dialogue, but too often it is simply a teacher talking or giving a presentation while the students all dutifully take notes. Moving the direct instruction outside of class time frees up more time for teachers to interact one-on-one or in small groups with students. Ideally, a teacher in a flipped classroom is able to talk to student in every class every day.

 

3.       It Creates an Atmosphere of Learning:

Flipped classroom involves the teacher interacting with each student; the teacher can help one student drill deeper into a subject while providing another with the appropriate support to become successful. This creates an atmosphere where learning, rather than teaching, is the goal. Students begin to take more and more ownership of their own learning. And if students take ownership for their own learning, they are no longer passive recipients of knowledge but active learners

 

4.       Students Can Learn at Their Pace:

As teachers, we often speak too quickly. We know our content well, and we know how to convey it—or so we think. When we are teaching a specific topic, we often try to pace our instruction on the basis of the needs of the majority of our students. If we go too fast, then many students get left behind; if we go too slowly, we bore many. So we typically shoot for the middle. One thing very powerful about moving direct instruction out of the group class time and onto a video is the fact that students have control of the pause and rewind buttons. Students can pause the teacher who is speaking faster than they can process. Students can rewind and go over a difficult topic as many times as necessary instead of asking the teacher to go back to the previous PowerPoint slide. By creating instructional videos, teachers can help students learn at a pace that is most appropriate for each of them..

 

5.       It Helps When Students Are Absent:

Teachers spend a lot of time preparing a polished presentation, but invariably some students are out of class. The absent students ask what they missed, and this requires the teacher to reteach what had been painstakingly done in class. However, absent students in a flipped classroom never miss direct instruction. They will miss out on the engaging in-class activities, but the main content will have been covered on an asynchronously accessible video.

 

6.       It Helps When the Teacher Is Absent:

Teachers are often out of the building for a variety of reasons: professional development, illness, coaching, meetings, and so on, and it can be difficult to find qualified substitute teachers. Creating instructional videos is a great way to prevent students from getting behind. Even if you don’t completely flip your classroom, you could create short videos for when you are gone and redeem the time you are out of your classroom.

 

7.       Relationships with Students Are Better:

When teachers are in among their students, conversing with them and listening to them, teachers get to know their students’ struggles with content and can lead them to the place of the aha moment! As teachers are interacting more closely with students, they get to know them more as individuals. Teachers learn of their struggles, their hopes, and their fears. Teachers are able to develop a mentoring relationship with students and are able to know them more, and thus teachers have more opportunities to care for them and reach out to them in their times of need.

 

Challenges Faced by students on implementation of Flipped Classroom:

Students found the audio quality of certain videos to be poor. On those occasions, it made it difficult for students to clearly hear the instructor irrespective of how high they adjusted their audio settings. They also commented on how some of the video lectures had background noise, which made it difficult for them to easily follow along and fully comprehend the concepts being explained by the instructor. In other instances, students were not pleased with administrative processes that resulted in the delay by a few days of the release time of certain videos. They felt that the lack of timely distribution of the video lectures did not allow them sufficient time to adequately prepare for the quizzes and the in-class practice problems, which were issued on a weekly basis.

 

Moreover, when they did view the video lectures at home, some students expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that they could not ask questions of the instructor in real-time. The instructor had recommended to students to record their questions during their viewing of the video and bring them to the next tutorial session and/or class as an item for discussion but some students felt that the lag in time did not appropriately facilitate their learning. Also, a few students stated that by the time they arrived to the tutorial session and/or the class, they had forgotten which areas they had difficulties understanding in the videos.

 

The final concern expressed by some students was the fact that the video lectures were often over an hour long in length, which made it difficult for them to view them in a single seating. Further complicating this issue was the fact that on those occasions when students decided to pause the video and return to it a short time later, many experienced technical difficulties. They were unable to recommence viewing the video from the point where they had previously paused it since the video location had returned to its original starting point.

 

Research statistics on Flipped Classroom:

·         In 2012,73% of teachers recognized the term “Flipped Classroom” , in 2014 that is up to 96%

·         In 2012, 48% of teachers flipped at least one lesson, in 2014 it is up to 78%

·         96% of teachers who have flipped a lesson would recommend that method to others teachers.

·         46% of teachers researched have been teaching for more than 16 years, but are moving towards flipped classrooms

·         9 out of 10 teachers noticed a positive change in student engagement since flipping their classroom (up 80% from 2012) and increased to 88% in 2014

·         71% of teachers indicated that grades of their students have improved since implementing a flipped classroom strategy

·         Of the teachers who do not flip their classroom lessons, 89% said that they would be interested in learning more about the pedagogy.

·         The majority of flipped teaching still occurs in high school - however the number of elementary teachers and college instructors has increased over the past 2 years. Flipped instruction also expanded in all subject areas.

·         Flipped classroom teachers indicated that a majority of students with special needs, English language learners, from low income households and those in advanced placement classes particularly benefit from flipped learning.

·         77% of students watch videos which teachers create.

·         52% of teachers share videos with students that have been created by other teachers

·         30%  of teachers are willing to assign content created by education vendors of teachers who are flipping their classroom started as their own initiative - This indicates it’s part of a grassroots movement from classroom teachers

·         82% of teachers say that the biggest barrier is using the flipped classroom model is concern about all students having access to technology at home.

·         33% of teachers say they are not sure the content they usually deliver in class can be effectively delivered in short online lessons.

·         60% say students really like using technology. So this approach should be more engaging for them.

·         65% say the most appealing aspect of flipping is more classroom time for collaborative activities and hands on projects.

·         64% think the flipped model places more responsibility for learning in the hands of the students.

 

Flipped Classroom as a vehicle to the future:

Flipping the classroom can be very powerful tool in the field of education. Today, most schools and colleges use some type of virtual learning environment. They’ve aided the beginnings of ‘flipped’ classrooms – where students view video lectures or read background material at home and spend their class time being guided through exercises, projects, or discussions on the material.

 

When people talk about the future of technology in education, they picture every student having access to a computer or a tablet; they see paperless rooms where technology trained teachers lead the class. . With the ease of Google Apps and similar applications, students can share files and work on documents and spreadsheets in real time – whether they’re a mile down the road or in a different country altogether. The future of education is increased inter-connectivity.

 

Trips to the library, although still important, can often be seen as a barrier to keen students who want to jump into things and instantly scan through more information. Students who want to learn more about a subject or skill will soon have everything they need linked right from their online portal. With flipped classrooms, teachers are able to let advanced students take on slightly more complex projects without disrupting the rest of the class. Students who are falling behind will have the resources online so they can catch up at home. Interconnected classrooms mean that advanced students will no longer feel bored – they will be able to collaborate with other pupils from around the world.

 

In the future, we can expect more of a shift towards this model, as a growing number of U.S. and UK schools are flipping their lessons plans. The increased availability of cheap and fast technology goes hand in hand with this.

 

CONCLUSION:

The Indian education system come a long way of evolution-from the Vedic days dating around 1700 BC to today’s computer age and e-learning. The information and communication technologies are making a large impact in the move towards e-learning in recent years. The transformation of education is really about transforming ourselves. One such transformation is “Flipped Classroom” which is type of blended learning that reverses the traditional learning environment by delivering instructional; content, often online, outside the classroom.

 

This simple concept has made an impact on thousands of students across the globe. The term ‘Flipped Classroom’ changes the role of teachers completely. Instead of being the ‘wise person in class’ they play the role of a coach. Some teachers might initially resist adopting this methodology. But most teachers, keeping student interests primary, experience that flipped classrooms result in students doing better and that they are learning the content faster with deeper understanding.

 

For India to leapfrog into the future and produce globally competitive work force it is imperative that we adopt these new models which leverage technology with new age learning skills. Education institutions which profess to be pioneers must not wait for policy makers to effect changes. They must take the lead and pave the way for others to follow.

 

REFERENCES:

1.     Bergmann, J., Overmyer, J., and Wilie, B. (2015). The Flipped Class: Myths vs. Reality - THE DAILY RIFF - Be Smarter. About Education. Thedailyriff.com. Retrieved 5 January 2015, from: http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-flipped-class-conversation-689.php

2.     Davies RS, Dean DL and Ball N 2013, `Flipping the classroom and instructional technology integration in a college-level information systems spreadsheet course', Educational Tech.

3.     Enfield, J. (2013). Looking at the Impact of the Flipped Classroom Model of Instruction on Undergraduate Multimedia Students at CSUN. Techtrends, 57(6), 14-27.

4.     Hamdan, N., McKnight, P., McKnight, K., and Arfstrom, K. (2013). Research, Reports and Studies / Lit Review. Flippedlearning.org. Retrieved 5 January 2015, from: http://www.flippedlearning.org/review

5.     Lage, M., Platt, G., and Treglia, M. (2000). Inverting the Classroom: A Gateway to Creating an Inclusive Learning Environment. The Journal of Economic Education, 31(1), 30.

6.     Tucker, B. (2012). The Flipped Classroom - Education Next. Education Next. Retrieved 5 January 2015, from: http://educationnext.org/the-flipped-classroom/

7.     Williams, C. (2002). Learning On-line: A review of recent literature in a rapidly expanding field. Journal of Further And Higher Education, 26(3), 263-272.

8.     Strayer, J. F. (2012). How learning in an inverted classroom influences cooperation, innovation and task orientation. Learning Environments Research, 15(2), 171–193. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10984-012-9108-4.

9.     Adam Butt, Australian National University (2014) Student Views 0n The Use Of A Flipped Classroom Approach: Evidence from Australia, Business Education and Accreditation, Volume 6, Number 1.

 

 

 

 

Received on 28.11.2017          Modified on 05.01.2018

Accepted on 29.01.2018           ©A&V Publications All right reserved