A Primer for Creating a Flipped Psychology Course

Abstract

Instructional design for psychology courses is ever changing. Recently, there has been an explosion of scholarly literature related to flipped classroom pedagogy in higher education. This essentially entails inverting a course so that lectures are viewed outside of class, and class time is devoted to active learning through activities such as demonstrations and group work. Although beneficial to student learning, implementing the flipped course design into a psychology class can be difficult, time consuming, and daunting. As such, we provide a primer for successful implementation of the flipped design. Based on the literature, we describe several teaching tips (e.g., what content to deliver in class versus online) that may aid in the implementation process. Additionally, we describe several common pitfalls to avoid (e.g., apprehension about learning new technology) when implementing the flipped classroom.