Abstract:

Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted education at all levels around the world. The necessity of online course delivery has forced those in higher education to find new and effective ways to deliver course materials, and to facilitate student interaction and discussion without being physically present. Many have taken cues from blended and flipped classroom approaches, where lessons are often presented and recorded in digital format along with additional learning materials and then made available online for student consumption. However, blended and flipped approaches generally have an essential “in person” component where students can directly interact with and get help from instructors and collaborate with one another face-to-face – a component that is missing from a fully online course. We can also look for ideas outside of traditional educational institutions, such as online course providers who have been involved in online learning for years before the pandemic. However, these are often for-profit enterprises whose approaches are geared towards servicing large numbers of motivated self-study students, but are not integrated into a long-term course of study nor designed to foster peer groups.

In 2014, our Computer Science department began transitioning our introductory computing courses from a traditional to a flipped classroom model of instruction. We created complete sets of video lectures and digital course materials, and hosted them online for students to go through outside of the classroom. Lecture times became general question-and-answer discussion sessions, but most of the direct interaction with and among students took place during lab times. Here, students could ask direct questions about their programs, get help with technical problems, and work together on exercises in groups. While it was fortuitous to have online materials prepared and refined before the beginning of the pandemic, we still had to find alternatives to help compensate for the loss of in-person classes and labs, which we feel are essential components of our courses.

In this experience report, we focus on three major technology-based changes that we made to our flipped classroom approach at the beginning of the pandemic, discuss their effectiveness and students’ perception, and how their use has evolved over the past 18 months.

These changes are:
(1) the use of online Zoom meetings in place of question-and-answer discussion sessions;
(2) the increased reliance on Piazza online forums for course communication and triage for student issues; and
(3) requiring students to record themselves taking quizzes and exams to preserve academic integrity.

Some of our more interesting findings include that the online Piazza forums developed into the primary venue for answering student questions and course discussions, and not the Zoom sessions. Furthermore, the Zoom sessions appear to play a more social rather than informational role for classes. We also found that although Piazza forums are a useful tool for communication and discussion, there appears to be little correlation between student involvement in Piazza and performance. Finally, we found that requiring students to record themselves during quizzes and exams has not led to more instances of detected cheating, but rather appears to be an effective deterrent.

Keywords:

Online learning, flipped classroom, blended learning, pandemic education.