Using flipped classroom to promote active learning and engagement in a Software Testing subject remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents the results obtained in an implementation of a flipped classroom, taught remotely synchronously in a subject of software testing in a graduate class. Due to the maintenance of the COVID-19 pandemic in the year 2021 due to the emergence of some variants, some universities around the world, especially in countries with a still high transmission rate, decided to continue with remote classes in this academic period. In this context, Software Testing is an important topic of knowledge derived from Software Engineering and has been gaining prominence in development companies in recent years, however it is a subject that needs a more practical and dynamic way of learning to obtain skills and competences. by the students. In order to promote a good teaching and learning process, more and more teachers and professors have been taking greater care in the selection of teaching strategies to help build the knowledge of their students, one of these strategies is the flipped classroom, in which the student internalizes the contents pointed out before a class and then, together with the class, a discussion is held about the knowledge acquired with the help and guidance of the teacher / professor. However, this knowledge transfer process has some extra difficulties with content that are more easily taught in a practical and face-to-face manner. Assuming, this work presents how the authors got around these difficulties and what the students present in a graduate class in a Software Testing subject thought of the adopted teaching strategy. To present an experience report of the use of the flipped classroom strategy in a software testing subject in a graduate computer science class. In parallel also, analyze the motivation and engagement of students in this learning scenario of the strategy in remote teaching. For this subject, a specific curriculum was selected for the teaching of software testing that takes into account the academic competences of the Brazilian Ministry of Education – MEC. Both the learning of the content were evaluated, taking into account the evaluations that were used in the flipped classroom with other teaching strategies in two other previous classes, the feedback given by the students about the subject and specifically about this teaching strategy was also considered, which was obtained via a structured questionnaire answered anonymously by each of the students participating in the course. The results indicate that there was an increase in the students' grade compared to evaluations of the same subject in the two previous years. However, the most important result was the feedback given by the students in the perception questionnaire of each teaching strategy adopted in the subject, considering that there was an excellent acceptance according to the participants. This paper mainly aims to help teachers / professors and researchers of active teaching methodologies in the perspective of knowledge construction in remote teaching using the flipped classroom as a support strategy.