The study examines students' assessments of the use of the flipped classroom approach in an undergraduate course in the Business Department at the College for Academic Studies in Israel. In its essence, learners prepare for classes by watching videos away from class, allowing the classroom encounter to focus on discussion, exercises, and discourse. Data were collected by a questionnaire distributed toward the end of the course. The students reported that watching videos between lessons enhanced interest, alleviated boredom, and enriched the learning. To a lesser extent, they reported it increased their involvement in learning, understanding of the learning material, and confidence in their ability to understand it. While acknowledging the convenience of watching course videos between classes, however, the participants clearly preferred to watch them in class. Multivariate analysis revealed that working students were less positive about using the flipped-classroom approach than non-working students, female students were more positive than male ones, and older students were more positive than younger ones. Furthermore, the stronger the senses of having classmates nearby, the more positive the participants were about the contribution of watching the videos.Keywords: Flipped-classroom approach, Higher education, Improving classroom learning, Educational videos
IntroductionThe flipped-classroom model is a pedagogical approach that has become something of a buzzword in the last recent years. In its essence, learners prepare for classes by watching videos away from class, allowing the classroom encounter to focus on discussion, exercises, and discourse on the basis of what students learned from the videos. The origin of the flippedclassroom approach is attributed to a number of researchers and teachers. For example, the researcher Baker wrote about Classroom Flipping in a paper from 2000 described the evolution of the classroom teacher from "the sage on the stage" to "the guide on the side" (Baker, 2000). Also, the science teachers Bergmann and Sams started employing the flipped classroom model in (Noonoo, 2012. Later, Salman Khan, who in March 2011, on Ted Talk, introduced his initiative for the development of short videos in mathematics. The idea was that students should watch the videos before class, freeing the teacher to focus classroom time on discussion, exercises, and helping those who have difficulty. At the present writing (August 2014), more than 2,600 clips have been produced on a range of topics in mathematics, biology, and physics, to name only a few (https://www.khanacademy.org). Allowing students to watch videos before class, at the time of their choosing, as often as they wish, and stopping wherever they feel necessary, is revolutionary-a "flipping" of the traditional model of classroom learning. In this new paradigm, the "lecture" is studied online and away from class and the "homework" is done in class itself. Studying course content before a lesson in class is not a novel idea in education. ...