Week 6 of this EDU720 module, opened up with a discussion about our thoughts on how best to evaluate our flipped classroom activities. For me, there were three key points that should be considered in any evaluation – if the approach solved the original problem it was introduced for, if the students found the approach useful and, in my specific case, how well the project-based element fitted into the overall activity.
There has been a lot of discussion on the forums more generally throughout the last few weeks, about whether flipped learning activities actually improve the work that students and the amount that they are learning. As we’ve experienced, these kinds of activities are usually introduced to solve a problem or re-image a specific part of a course, so it’s very important to consider whether the activity actually resolved the problem for which it was introduced. Jill’s response on this week’s forum sums this up nicely, as although she enjoyed running the activity and found it useful, she suggests that ‘would probably not introduce a flipped classroom approach, as the most fundamental reason to do so is to free up seminar time, which is not an objective of my type of course’ (Dunn, 2019). Another idea I raised in my suggested evaluation points, was that of how to establish if the flipped learning activity directly impacted upon the assessment (given I wanted to introduce a project-based approach) – evaluating this would be a much longer process and beyond the bounds of evaluating the flipped activity alone. This was something Paul picked up on suggesting that ‘this is part of evaluating the alignment of this approach into the overall module’ (Roger, 2019) and that a positive response to the flipped learning activity should, in theory, ‘feed thru to an improvement in the summative assessment’ (Roger, 2019).