Engage Your Students Before Class: More Pre-Class Engagement for More Effective Flipped Classrooms

Abstract

Lacking student preparation before class has been the most commonly identified challenge when adopting the flipped classroom approach. In this study, we have introduced a class activity which can increase student pre-class online engagement and help them better prepare for the in-class activity. During this activity, students are required to work in small groups before in-class activities to answer open-ended questions related to the course learning materials via an online shared document. Based on teachers’ duty, there are four stages for implementation of the proposed activity which are: (1) initiation: teacher needs to design open-ended questions and creates online shared editable documents for each group; (2) scaffolding: teacher assists learners in providing responses by checking their editing logs; (3) assessment: students’ access to the online shared documents will be suspended and teacher will evaluate students responses; and (4) reflection: teacher will address common issues and propose more challenging questions before the related in-class activities. We have conducted experiments in the third cohort of a flipped general education course on computational thinking and algorithms. Except for the proposed class activity, the first two cohorts of this course have the same design and content in three topics and therefore worked as control groups. Online interaction data of all three cohorts have been collected for a thorough comparison. Results showed that students’ average lecture video access rates have improved in the third cohort compared to the first two cohorts by 49 % and 39 % respectively. The percentage of students who never accessed any lecture videos decreased from around 29 % in the first and second cohorts to 6 % in the third cohort where the proposed activity was implemented. A statistically significant difference was discovered between the first and third cohorts (t = −15.06, p<0.00001), and between the second and third cohorts (t = _27.02, p<0.00001) of the course in lecture video access rates.