Online learning mediated by social teaching platforms: an experience from a flipped undergraduate physics course in renewable energies

Abstract

Active learning strategies and information technology-based pedagogies are perceived as beneficial and their use and development in academic courses is fast increasing. Faculties can use them to design courses that are challenging and fresher, creative, and meaningful for students, to meet students’ needs and to promote the learning of contents in a social environment, fostering cooperation and the exchange of ideas among peers. Among the active learning strategies recently developed, the peer-instruction and the flipped classroom are prominent in this field. It has been shown that these practices help students in their understanding of contents and consequently in reaching better results in final exam scores. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 has forced classes in many academic institutions to move to remote teaching under emergency conditions and has deprived students of much of their social interactions. We show here an experience on applying online learning mediated by social teaching platforms and flipped classroom concepts to an undergraduate course on renewable energies provided amid the Covid-19 pandemic at the Physics Department of the University of Cagliari (Italy) in 2020. The constraints of forced distance learning have been turned into an opportunity to test an alternate course format in a complete online environment. An analysis on students’ feedback about our learning method has been performed by a post-diagnostic satisfaction questionnaire, indicating an overall positive effects of active learning strategies in the students’ learning experience. The analysis of their achievements during the course provides confirmation for the positive outcome and shows that the flipped classroom architecture is as robust as the traditional methods when facing the constraints of remote learning.