Design and Evaluate the Factors for Flipped Classrooms for Data Management Courses

Abstract

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents a framework to evaluate and design flipped classroom activities for data science and management courses. Variants of flipped classrooms have been employed in STEM fields with great success in students' learning outcomes. Research shows that flipped classrooms would improve students' learning if it is implemented following rigorous procedures of an efficient instructional design. As a result, one of the critical focus of current flipped classroom research is what factors educators need to consider when designing a flipped learning environment. Currently, educators incorporate various factors such as "pre-recorded video lecture", "group activity" as a trial and error basis and adjust these factors based on their own experience and students' feedback. On the other hand, the emergence of big data expects a new graduate to demonstrate mastery of concepts and skills for data acquisition, management, and analysis of inference from data when they enter the workforce. Currently, there is no systematic approach available to design a flipped classroom that is for the data science and management courses. In this research, we develop a framework first to investigate and evaluate the flipped classroom factors mentioned in the literature and identify a few that are most relevant to the two data management courses at our institute. Then, we classify each course topics into broader categories. So that the flipped classroom model can be developed for each category. For the flipped classroom for each category, we identify the pre-class and in-class activities to meet a certain learning objective for that topic category for each course. To evaluate the effectiveness of different factors as well as our flipped classroom models, students' performance data, interviews, and surveys are conducted. This process is transformative and can be employed by other STEM disciplines to find the most influential factors to design effective flipped learning classrooms.

Multi-Stakeholder Research Data Management Training as a Tool to Improve the Quality, Integrity, Reliability and Reproducibility of Research

“…Hence, assessing BRDM's results is based not only on the feedback and self-rating of the participants' competencies with further learning needs (typical measures of success in many previous trainings) but the returned DMPs. Fourth, a flipped classroom approach that is rarely used as a teaching method in previous RDM training (Griffin, 2020;Johnston & Jeffryes, 2015;Mithun & Luo, 2020), was adapted in the BRDM 2021 course. Fifth, many previous RDM trainings have been criticised for inadequate reporting (Goben & Griffin, 2019;Perrier et al, 2017).…”

“…Though planning and implementing the flipped classroom approach takes a lot of work from teachers, it pays back by increasing flexibility and helping activate participants. Still, quizzes or follow-up tasks are essential to show that participants learned the pre-class materials, as Mithun and Luo (2020) have pointed out.…”

Integrating Microlearning Instructional Approach into an Introductory Data-management Course

“…While our literature review shows that innovative teaching methods such as flipped classrooms might improve student learning outcomes and teacher satisfaction, researchers have found that the success of flipped implementations depends on the content area, instructional design, and level of student expertise (e.g., Mithun & Luo, 2020). One common obstacle in using these approaches is the handling of students skipping video lectures due to a lack of motivation; this lack of engagement often leads to overwhelming feelings when they cannot follow the course content (Sobral, 2021).…”

“…Emerging fields such as Big Data and Data Science require new IT graduates to demonstrate their mastery in data acquisition, data management, and data inference skills when they enter the workforce (Mithun & Luo, 2020). Thus, introductory programming courses such as database programming and design represent crucial milestones in IT education, as they reflect students' ability to solve problems and design appropriate solutions (Skala & Drilk, 2018).…”

“…2 Background & Drilk, 2018;Mithun & Luo, 2020). Students often have difficulty retaining and applying their acquired knowledge (Malik & Coldwell-Neilson, 2018).…”