Abstract:

New technologies and teaching approaches are having enormous effects on education practices. The inverted classroom has emerged as an exciting unconventional approach to structuring a classroom environment to enhance active learning. This model allows instructors to provide engaging content but also to cater to different learning styles by reserving more classroom time for interaction and problem-solving. Many learning responsibilities are correspondingly shifted to the student, which leads to a sense of autonomy. The implementation of the inverted classroom pedagogy varies depending on the instructor, learning objectives, activities, content, and available teaching resources. Instructors use whatever technologies are provided to enable and complement this pedagogy; however, there is a lack of standard design features for a tool solely devoted to this teaching method. Using interviews as a way to extract rich and detailed experiences from instructors who have implemented this pedagogy, and Activity Theory as an interpretive theoretical lens, I am investigating current practices surrounding inverted classrooms to (1) understand the phenomenon as a whole; and (2) elicit design requirements for a technology that best supports this pedagogy.

Keywords:

Inverted classroom, flipped classroom, active learning, online education.