Work-in-Progress: A Novel Approach to Collaborative Learning in the Flipped Classroom

The flipped classroom is widely regarded as an excellent approach to exploit the affordances of digital and on-line technologies to actively engage students and improve learning. The traditional lectures “covering” course content are moved to on-line videos accessible to students before the class meetings, with the class meeting times being devoted mostly to discussion and application of the new ideas, and other active learning tasks. The expectation has been that this will make the courses much more effective and students will be able to achieve the intended course outcomes to a much greater extent than in the traditional classroom. But the results have been disappointing. Although students find the flipped classroom engaging, student achievement of course learning outcomes, as reported by most researchers who have used the approach, has been roughly the same as in traditional classes. How do we tailor the flipped classroom to achieve its full potential? That is the question our workin-progress attempts to address. The thesis underlying our approach, based on classic work in the area of how people learn, is that it is not enough to have students watch the on-line videos before the class meeting. They should also engage in serious, structured discussions with other students, and thoughtfully consider ideas that may conflict with their own understanding of the topic in question both in order to help them develop a deeper understanding of the topic and in order to highlight problem areas that need further elaboration by the instructor. We discuss the theoretical basis behind the work, provide some details of the prototype implementation of an on-line tool that enables such structured discussions, and describe our plans for using it in an undergraduate course on software engineering and for assessing the approach.