Can We "Flip" Non-Major Programming Courses Yet?

Abstract

Proponents of "flipped" instruction offer a vision of class meetings devoted to active learning, in exchange for students spending time outside of class acquiring basic knowledge from readings or video lectures. The price paid for this vision is the need to create the readings or videos. However, such materials are becoming available as open educational resources, and if they become widely enough available it may be possible to flip classes without requiring each instructor to develop his or her own materials. In the spring of 2014 I flipped an introductory programming course for non-computing majors in an effort to see if freely available video lectures could support it. This paper reports my findings, notably that open resources can support such a course, but just barely.

Increasing Students’ Responsibility and Learning Outcomes Using Partial Flipped Classroom in a Language Processors Course

“…Literature provides examples of mixed or even negative results regarding students' attendance rates [21], [41] and students' satisfaction [13], [40]. This study provides empirical evidence of a high students' engagement and retention, and the teacher did not notice differences in attendance rates, although it has not been objectively measured.…”

“…One experience observed satisfied students [17] while other observed unsatisfied ones [26]. Finally, two studies detected low students' engagement [40] and low participation in the in-class sessions [21]. From the point of view of the final submission, this work contributes with an experience where high retention rates and significant improvements in students' learning outcomes who were taught with the FC methodology have been observed.…”

“…Finally, although we mentioned some studies showing positive results, Giannakos, Krogstie, and Sampson [39] conclude that, on the one hand, many positive results lack of either sound demonstration or enough strength, on the other hand, there are some contradictory results that need to be clarified. For example, Baldwin [40] said that students recognized what they learnt but they were not satisfied with the learning experience. Other studies show that there is not a clear preference between FC and traditional lectures [13], especially in the last courses [31].…”

“…Gannod, Burge, and Helmick [36] flipped a Software Engineering course (focused in SOA and web services) with positive results while Herold et al [44] flipped another Software Engineering course without any reported result. Finally, Baldwin [40] observed low student's engagement in a CS1 course for non-majors in CS.…”

Flipped Classrooms for Introductory Computer Programming Courses

“…Most teaching-learning dynamics go through online versions of the course textbook [28] and videos before laboratory classes: 22 video tutorials [11], seventy-five 5-15-minute videos [15] or 7-11 minutes [11], one hour of video every week to prepare for lecture [16]; Videos are usually created by the instructor or chosen by him, but there are cases where students are encouraged to look for videos that fit the given subject [27]. Some articles report multiple-choice quizzes over the video material [18] or at the beginning of classes [24]. Inverted classes are generally used as a teaching-learning strategy, but in some cases Partially Flipped Classroom Model is used [21].…”