In teacher education, it is imperative that course design, method of instruction, and classroom procedures align with the content. One way to achieve this may be to “flip” the classroom. While flipped classrooms have received considerable attention in recent years, much remains unknown about their effect on basic psychological needs or learning outcomes of preservice teachers. The purpose of the present study was to address this gap by utilizing a quasi-experimental design to examine differences in motivation and objective learning outcomes after controlling for socioeconomic status (SES) and grade point average (GPA) between traditional and flipped sections of a foundational educational course ( N = 263). Results revealed that preservice teachers in the traditional section had significantly higher scores on two of the motivation outcomes (e.g., intrinsic and identified regulation), but that preservice teachers in the flipped sections had significantly higher scores on several indices of objective learning outcomes. Implications for teacher education are discussed.

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Improving STEM MOOC evaluation requires an understanding of the current state of STEM MOOC evaluation, as perceived by all stakeholders.  To this end, we investigated what kinds of information STEM MOOC instructors currently use to evaluate their courses and what kinds of information they feel would be valuable for that purpose.  We conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 faculty members from a variety of fields and research institutions who had taught STEM MOOCs on edX, Coursera, or Udacity.  Four major themes emerged related to instructors' desires: (1) to informally assess learners as an instructor might in a traditional classroom, (2) to assess learners’ attainment of personal learning goals, (3) to obtain in-depth qualitative feedback from learners, and (4) to access more detailed learner analytics regarding the use of course materials.  These four themes contribute to a broader sentiment expressed by the instructors that they have access to a wide variety of quantitative data for use in evaluation, but are largely missing the qualitative information that plays a significant role in traditional evaluation.  Finally, we provide our recommendations for MOOC evaluation criteria, based on these findings.

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