Umeå universitets logga

Flipped classroom teaching means, in short, to change/flip where students and teachers do things. Instead of students (passively) listening to a teacher's lecture in the classroom and then going home to solve problems on their own, the idea is that students first watch video lectures at home and then come to the classroom to (actively) solve problems together with other students and the teacher.

As part of an ongoing pedagogical project, we have used a special learning management system (LMS) called Scalable Learning, which facilitates teaching with flipped classroom techniques. The Scalable Learning LMS allows the teacher to make the video lectures interactive by adding quizzes and surveys to the videos (as is very common in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), thereby helping the students to be more active while watching the videos. Moreover, there are different tools implemented in the LMS so that students e.g., can ask questions in direct connection to the videos. The student supplied questions and their answers to the quizzes can then, together with other data from the LMS, be used by the teacher to prepare classroom activities customized to the students' needs.

We present our experiences of teaching a course in statistics using this LMS; there are both pros and cons from a teacher's point of view. Also, we present the students’ opinions with the LMS and with the flipped classroom teaching that they were exposed to during the course. Most of them were very satisfied with the concept but they also provided us with several interesting ideas on how to improve the course. The pedagogical project mentioned above is a so called PUNKTUM-project funded by Umeå university during 2017-2018. The project title is Aktivt lärande på webben och i klassrummet med särskild programvara för att kombinera det bästa av Flipped classroom och MOOCs.