Abstract:

Because of the great advances of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), nowadays big amount of information is available in electronic support, in audio, text and video format. And young people are aware of that, and they access material in that media for studying. Therefore, the way of teaching should adequate to this way of accessing information chosen by students.

The flipped classroom is an experimental model which intends to transform the traditional model where the professor gives a lecture in the class and then students make activities at home, by other significantly different, where students learn contents outside the class and make activities in the class. It means to assign students the less active tasks to do at home, while the ones that need more participation and integration are reserved to be done in the class. And to learn contents at home, videos are a useful tool.

Both students and teachers, thanks to the easy access to ICT, now can have access to materials available on the web. YouTube, Khan Academy, and other repositories offers a great amount of videos that perhaps can be used when flipping the classroom to design the activities outside the class. If no videos are found to satisfy the professor´s requirements, tailor made videos can be designed in an easy way, perhaps recording a class or using some programs that using a tablet, let record what happens on the screen and the voice together.
The purpose of this paper is to present an experience of flipping the class in a Calculus course of engineer careers, when teaching the issue Trigonometric Functions. Two surveys were conducted among the students before applying the methodology of flipped classroom so as to gather information about the students’ habits of study, and their opinion of using videos and changing the way that academics teach. Another survey was applied after “the flipped classroom” so as students can express their opinion about the experience.

In this experience some existing videos were selected carefully, taking advantage of the variety and amount of available resources on the Web referred to the issue Trigonometric Functions. Students were asked to watch the videos for a certain date, and after that date, group activities were assigned to students in class, so as to evaluate the understanding of the contents dealt in the given videos. Taking into account that this model is centered on the student and on the promotion of autonomous learning, the experience yielded satisfactory results. Besides, it encouraged teachers to continue applying the methodology of flipped learning in this Calculus course.

Keywords:

Flipped classroom, ICT, Videos.