Abstract:

The current COVID-19 pandemic forced higher education institutions to pivot to online delivery. Combined with the pervasiveness of accessing information online, this has made the flipped classroom a viable option. The flipped classroom employs asynchronous video lectures and practice problems as homework and active, problem-solving activities in the classroom. This paper presents how a first-year course in introduction to management adopted a flipped classroom approach.

Online materials were developed which allowed students to learn foundation management concepts and theories online at their own pace. This allowed the teachers to dedicate face to face time to strengthen the application of advanced concepts through active learning through collaboration using the case study method. Using Bloom’s revised taxonomy, the flipped classroom approach shifts the lower levels of taxonomy (remember and understand) outside the class using interactive technologies, enabling students to spend more class time at the upper end of the taxonomy, engaging with task that apply, analyze, evaluate, and create during the workshop.

The design of the online materials was influenced by cognitive load theory which assumes a limited working memory linked to an unlimited long-term memory. Kirschner (2002) asserts that because of this, instruction should be designed such that working memory is capable of processing the instruction. Education designers have to ensure that only about seven items of information at any one time are to be brought into working memory. Furthermore, because working memory is also used to organise, contrast, compare, cognitive load proposes that one can only process two or three items of information simultaneously as opposed to merely holding that information. Once this information is processed in the short-term memory it gets transferred to the long-term memory for more permanent storage.

Three types of online materials were developed to support the flipping of the course. First, videos were designed to present the concepts and theories that would normally be delivered in a lecture. Second, a variety of online instructional resources (OIRs) were built using Adobe Captivate. These OIRs range from static slides, roll over and reveal, click and reveal, drag and drop, timelines, animations and video scenarios. Some of these OIRs had multiple choice questions embedded to enable immediate testing of the students’ understanding of the content. Lastly, an interactive document (using Feedback Fruits) contained the case study assigned that week with annotations and questions embedded in it.

Several pre- and post intervention metrics were used to evaluate the impact of the OIRs. The viewing analytics for the lecture recordings were compared to the Moodle activity completion rates for the OIRs show significant improvement in the number of times students access the online materials and that instead of accessing the lecture recordings only at the end of the semester for exam revision, students access the OIRs several times across the entire semester. Another metric that showed impact was the university student evaluation question “The resources helped the student achieve the learning outcomes for the course.” Comparing the scores for this question before and after flipping showed an improvement from 3.79 to 4.29 across 6 semesters. Lastly, qualitative comments specific to the online materials from the university student evaluation were also very positive.

Keywords:

Flipped classroom, management education, online learning, videos, interactive resources, active learning, cognitive load.