PAVING THE ROAD FOR FLIPPED TEACHING IN SPANISH UNIVERSITIES

Traditionally, lecturers working for Spanish universities have organised their lessons by devoting most contact time to cover theoretical contents. Once those theoretical contents are properly addressed, some reinforcing examples and practical exercises are worked out by the lecturer, again with hardly any student participation. Hence, student involvement only becomes possible when they are proposed to perform a series of tasks and exercises always after the lesson and generally outside the classroom.

Fortunately, things are starting to change for many universities which are increasingly promoting active learning methodologies, and this is happening as they have proven to significantly enhance the whole teaching-learning process. Among these active learning methodologies, flip teaching is one of the most frequent newly-adopted instructional strategies.

However, the introduction of flip teaching poses some challenges and it requires a radical change of mentality for both lecturers and students. Particularly, in order to succeed, both actors need to discontinue former work habits by working on the theoretical concepts outside the classroom, while also significantly increasing their degree of interaction both inside and outside the classroom. Lecturers must spearhead this process of change, but success can only be achieved with proper student involvement.

This paper shows how flip teaching was implemented in a subject within the Msc in Project Management at the Universitat Politècnica de València. Particular emphasis is given, therefore, to this particular instructional strategy and the three basic components it relies on: students, teaching staff and the teaching-learning methodology itself. Results and conclusions extends the discussion and provides some guidelines on facilitating the (necessary) adoption of this and other active learning methodologies in Spanish university classrooms.