Abstract:

The growing popularity of flipped classes in higher education indicates mounting support of instructional strategies that integrate active learning (AL) techniques to help develop students’ responsibility and control of their own learning through multiple ways of active classroom engagement with course content to which they have been given first exposure outside the classroom. The results of a trial of flipped lessons designed to enhance learning in an undergraduate college algebra course through out-of-class lecture videos followed by in-class problem-solving with discussion and practice exercises were described in the author’s presentation in INTED 2016 [1].

Following the case-study approach, the current paper builds on the data from the previous flipped lesson (FL) module trial, to explore the potential value of the data trace on the learning management system (LMS) that housed all course content accessed by the student cohort. Using learning analytics approaches, information about students’ learning behaviour during the study period, which had been automatically collected and archived by the LMS, were extracted and utilized to further inform the study findings and to provide additional insight into the learning affordances, beyond what was evidenced by the brief online survey and the assessment results as affirmation of student satisfaction with using FL with integrated video in the college algebra course. Learning analytics data mined from the LMS perform a potential beneficial function towards the formulation of student-specific learning recommendations that optimize the student’s mode of self-learning through consideration of metrics on motivation, time investment and preferences in learning strategies. The study displayed positive indications that implementation of the flipped class pedagogy using integrated videos enhances learning in the undergraduate college algebra course. Nonetheless, a caveat on conclusions and inferences from this study concerns design limitations in this small trial experiment.

Keywords:

Flipped lesson, video lectures, active learning, undergraduate mathematics, learning management system, learning analytics.