Data for Flipped Classroom Design: Using Student Feedback to Identify the Best Components from Online and Face-to-Face Classes

Abstract

Colleges and universities have seen considerable enrollment growth in online courses during the past decade. However, online modalities are not optimal for all subject areas or students. There is growing interest in hybrid, blended, and flipped instruction as a way to incorporate the best of different delivery methods. This study investigates and identifies student preferences for both face-to-face and online learning. Participants were undergraduate students from a mix of freshman, junior, and senior level courses. An open response instrument was used to allow broad insights into students' responses without biasing or limiting the feedback. Results suggest that the most positive impact with face-to-face learning is interaction through class discussions, group projects and other types of active learning. Females responded more positively than male students to interactivity in face-to-face classes. The data further indicates the most positive impact with online learning experiences is the class structure that supports flexibility, organization, and clear expectations. Nontraditional students reported more positively than traditional students about the benefits of flexible classes with clear course structures. This report should be of interest to educators who wish to take a research-based, student-centric, data-driven approach to the design of flipped or hybrid classrooms.

Peer Assessment within Hybrid and Online Courses: Students’ View of Its Potential and Performance

“…The fundamentally different outlooks at play in a brick and mortar class versus an online course complicate both. Whereas face-to-face interactions anchor the value of classroom settings, online instructors must look to promote student engagement with a class design structure that precisely specifies activities, assignments, and assessments without unduly sacrificing flexibility, organization, and clear expectations (Crews & Butterfield, 2014;Dixson, 2012). This literature suggests that encouraging students in an online environment to engage the class, as well as each other, fundamentally depends on the design and delivery of the course content.…”

“…The unique milieu of an online class, particularly when framed in terms of orthodox social cognitive or self-determination perspectives, creates situational uncertainties regarding a range of personal and contextual variable (Pekrun, 2006;Artino, 2009). For example, Crews and Butterfield (2014) found that face-to-face interaction significantly affects personal and environmental contextual relationships. If so, for example, then how does the absence of conventionally defined face-time in an online environment affect students' interpretation of the potential and performance of peer assessment opportunities?…”

“…Social processes set and sustain the intricate relationship between emotion and cognition in the processes commonly linked to learning (Pekrun, 2006;Artino, 2009). Crews and Butterfield (2014), for example, report that students saw the most positive impact of face-to-face learning in terms of this facilitation of direct interaction in the context of lectures, discussions, and in-class group activities. Enabling students to find common ground with ostensible strangers within a face-to-face class establishes the basis for the confident interactions that support a student's capacity to assess his or her peers.…”

Flipped Classroom: Effects on Education for the Case of Economics

“…This collaborative discussion on the primary sources may serve as the gateway into the broader topic discussion (Westermann, 2014). Crews and Butterfield (2014) indicated that the most positive impact of face-to-face learning is interaction in class discussions, group problems, and other types of active learning. Bligh (2000) argued that in spite of its criticisms, lecturing is as effective as most other teaching methods as a tool to transmit information.…”

FLIPPED: A Case Study in Fundamental of Accounting in Malaysian Polytechnic

“…The flipped course design is different from blended learning in that it combines the face to face and online modes of instruction in teaching and learning proses. Chen et al (2014) and Crews and Butterfield (2014) provide some guidelines for flipped learning course design and development. This study used the models proposed for designing effective flipped classroom for higher education course design.…”