Students' "resonance broadening" to teaching or how to improve students' learning using flipped classrooms

Paper in proceeding, 2016

In this paper, the effect of flipping the classroom on two courses in nuclear engineering is analyzed. These courses were previously given in a traditional campus-based format, before being converted to a flipped classroom format. One of the courses is in addition using a pure web-based set-up, in which the students and the teachers never meet face-to-face. In both courses, the students watch pre-recorded lectures, answer on-line quizzes, and provide feedback to the teachers on a voluntary basis, before attending wrap-up sessions and tutorials. Compared to the previous teaching format, the conversion to flipped courses resulted in in-creased student-teacher asynchronous and synchronous interactions, as well as enhanced understanding of the course concepts. These results are demonstrated both in a qualitative and a quantitative way. The qualitative analysis relies on the categorization of the questions received by the teachers using Bloom’s revised taxonomy for the cognitive domain and on the teachers’ perceptions of students’ understanding during the synchronous sessions. The quan-titative analysis relies on data provided by the learning management platform, by the asyn-chronous viewing system for the pre-recorded lectures, and by the synchronous viewing system (in the case of the web-based course). By flipping the classroom and using on-line quizzes, the students come much better prepared to the synchronous sessions, which, in itself, also results in increased interactions between the students and the teachers during such ses-sions. Another main advantage of this teaching format is the enhanced learning that results when students monitor their thinking and are actively involved in their own learning.