Remote Flipped Teaching during the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Abstract

Flipped teaching (FT) is known to foster active learning and increase student engagement. The flipped classroom design organizes learning in such a way that the lower‐order thinking such as memorization is expected at the individual student level in the form of homework and the higher‐order thinking including application and analysis occurs in the classroom in the presence of the instructor. With the sudden onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic, instructors and students were given no time to adjust to the remote educational set up. Flipped teaching, like most other instructional modalities, had to be transformed into an online platform. The present study assessed the effectiveness of FT in a remote setting in a graduate‐level physiology course (n=33). The course content included lecture videos, slides, and reading assignments which were made available on BlackBoard, the Learning Management System. Students were expected to have reviewed the assigned content prior to the virtual synchronous sessions. During the synchronous meeting, a question‐answer (Q&A) session allowed students to review the content yet again. Followed by the Q&A session, an individual quiz, containing lower‐order questions, was given to assess student preparation. Soon after the review of the quiz, students in small groups (4‐5 students per group) were allowed to use breakout rooms to complete a set of questions which were designed at the higher order of Bloom's taxonomy and expected students to apply knowledge, analyze or synthesize their collaborative responses. The answers to these questions were reviewed during the first part of the following synchronous session where students were selected randomly to answer these questions which prompted them to come prepared. Student surveys were administered at the beginning and the end of the course to assess their knowledge gain, perception of the remote FT format, and confidence in completing the course. Based on the survey results, it was found that the students adjusted well to the remote course setting (p<0.001) and their confidence in completing the course successfully increased from the beginning to the end of the semester (p<0.05). Students also found that the collaborative activities (93.55%) and the in‐class discussions (96.77%) were effective and were well adjusted to the synchronous computerized exams (90.32%) and the individual in‐class assessments (80.65%). Overall, the remote FT method was successful and therefore, the principles behind FT could be employed in virtual teaching.