Abstract:

Student engagement, i.e. the intensity and emotional quality of students’ involvement in initiating and carrying out learning activities, is an important predictor for academic performance. However, at KU Leuven, we observe that student engagement in bachelor program courses computer science is often low, which may lead to superficial knowledge of the learning material. Interactions with colleagues at other universities indicate similar issues. The question is then, how can we increase student engagement? Research has shown that the educational context can affect engagement and a good fit between the students and the context is key in transforming student’ abilities into achievement. An important approach to increase the fit between students and the educational context is flipped classroom.

Flipped classroom is a pedagogical approach that originates from active learning introduced by A. King in 1993. In a flipped classroom the activities that traditionally take place inside the classroom now take place outside the classroom and vice versa. Benefits have been found for flipped classroom such as enhanced engagement, effective education through student-student/teacher interactions, and students becoming more responsible learners. Recently, flipped classroom had gained increasing attention in higher education, also in computer science and software engineering in particular.

To investigate and tackle the issue of poor student engagement in our Bachelor program, we introduced a flipped classroom approach in a basic software engineering course. Instead of letting students taking online courses (videos) before the lectures and then applying the obtained knowledge during lectures, we designed a different flipped classroom approach centered on enhancing students’ responsibility in the learning process. In doing so, we aimed at tackling the specific challenges with poor engagement of students in bachelor courses.

Responsibly-centered learning follows an iterative process, where in each cycle a well-defined part of the course material is handled. A cycle starts with the docent defining specific goals for the part and preparing focus material. The students use this focus material to study the relevant course material with a course handbook, online material, and interactions with fellow students. The students then prepare and submit topics for discussion. The docent groups the topics in discussion themes and announces them. Students express their preferences for moderating the themes during a deepening session. The themes are allocated to students based on their preferences. Then follows the deepening session where students elaborate on the discussion themes moderated by one of the students. The docent provides instruction of specific problems on request. After the session, students can submit a summary of the topics for the part. Throughout the course, feedback sessions are organized, and at the end of the course an exam is organized that focuses on the course goals. The summaries submitted per part can be used during the exam.

We have applied the approach in a software engineering course in two academic years. The experience shows that responsibly-centered learning approach supports students becoming owners of the learning process, and students report that the approach fosters their engagement and enables them to obtain deeper understanding of the course material. We reflect on lessons learned and outline plans for the future.

Keywords:

Student engagement, flipped classroom, responsibly-centered learning.