The flipped classroom: A survey of the research

Recent advances in technology and in ideology have unlocked entirely new directions for education research. Mounting pressure from increasing tuition costs and free, online course offerings is opening discussion and catalyzing change in the physical classroom. The flipped classroom is at the center of this discussion. The flipped classroom is a new pedagogical method, which employs asynchronous video lectures and practice problems as homework, and active, group-based problem solving activities in the classroom. It represents a unique combination of learning theories once thought to be incompatible—active, problem-based learning activities founded upon a constructivist ideology and instructional lectures derived from direct instruction methods founded upon behaviorist principles. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of prior and ongoing research of the flipped classroom. Studies are characterized on several dimensions. Among others, these include the type of in-class and out-of-class activities, the measures used to evaluate the study, and methodological characteristics for each study. Results of this survey show that most studies conducted to date explore student perceptions and use single-group study designs. Reports of student perceptions of the flipped classroom are somewhat mixed, but are generally positive overall. Students tend to prefer in-person lectures to video lectures, but prefer interactive classroom activities over lectures. Anecdotal evidence suggests that student learning is improved for the flipped compared to traditional classroom. However, there is very little work investigating student learning outcomes objectively. We recommend for future work studies investigating of objective learning outcomes using controlled experimental or quasi-experimental designs. We also recommend that researchers carefully consider the theoretical framework used to guide the design of in-class activities. 1 The Rise of the Flipped Classroom There are two related movements that are combining to change the face of education. The first of these is a technological movement. This technological movement has enabled the amplification and duplication of information at an extremely low-cost. It started with the printing press in the 1400s, and has continued at an ever-increasing rate. The electronic telegraph came in the 1830s, wireless radio in the late 1800s and early 1900s, television in the 1920s, computers in the 1940s, the internet in the 1960s, and the world-wide web in the 1990s. As these technologies have been adopted, the ideas that have been spread through their channels have enabled a second movement. Whereas the technological movement sought to overcome real physical barriers to the free and open flow of information, this ideological movement seeks to remove the artificial, man-made barriers. This is epitomized in the free software movement (see, e.g., Stallman and Lessig [67]), although this movement is certainly not limited to software. A good example of this can be seen from the encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britannica has been continuously published for nearly 250 years [20] (since 1768). Although Encyclopedia Britannica content has existed digitally since 1981, it was not until the advent of Wikipedia in 2001 that open access to encyclopedic content became available to users worldwide. Access to Encyclopedia Britannica remains restricted to a limited number of paid subscribers [21], but access to Wikipedia is open, and the website receives over 2.7 billion US monthly page views [81]. Thus, although the technology and digital content was available to enable free access to encyclopedic content, ideological roadblocks prevented this from happening. It was not until these ideologies had been overcome that humanity was empowered to create what has become the world’s largest, most up-to-date encyclopedia [81]. In a similar way, we are beginning to see the combined effects of these two movements on higher education. In the technological arena, research has made significant advances. Studies show that video lectures (slightly) outperform in-person lectures [9], with interactive online videos doing even better (Effect size=0.5) [83,51]. Online homework is just as effective as paper-and-pencil homework [8,27], and carefully developed intelligent tutoring systems have been shown to be just as effective as human tutors [77]. Despite these advancements, adoption has been slow, as the development of good educational systems can be prohibitively expensive. However, the corresponding ideological movement is breaking down these financial barriers. Ideologically, MIT took a significant step forward when it announced its OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative in 2001 [53]. This opened access to information that had previously only been available to students who paid university tuition, which is over $40,000/yr at MIT [54]. Continuing this trend, MIT alum Salman Khan founded the Khan Academy in 2006, which has released a library of over 3200 videos and 350 practice exercises 2012. The stated mission of the Khan Academy is to provide “a free world-class education to anyone anywhere2012.” In the past year, this movement has rapidly gained momentum. Inspired by Khan’s efforts, Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Andrew Ng opened access to their online courses in Fall 2011. Thrun taught artificial intelligence with Peter Norvig, attracting over 160,000 students to their free online course. Subsequently, Thrun left the university and founded Udacity, which is now hosting 11 free courses [76]. With support from Stanford, Ng also started his own open online educational initiative, Coursera. Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan have joined the Coursera partnership, which has expanded its offerings to 42 courses [10]. MIT has also upgraded its open educational initiative, and joined with Harvard in a $60 million dollar venture, edX [19]. EdX will, “offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free.” While online education is improving, expanding, and becoming openly available for free, university tuition at brick-and-mortar schools is rapidly rising [56]. Tuition in the University of California system has nearly tripled since 2000 [32]. Naturally, this is not being received well by university students in California [2]. Likewise, students in Quebec are actively protesting planned tuition hikes [13]. In resistance to planned tuition hikes, student protestors at Rutgers interrupted (on June 20, 2012) a board meeting to make their voices heard [36]. Adding fuel to the fire, results from a recent study by Gillen et al. [31] indicate that undergraduate student tuition is used to subsidize research. As a result, the natural question being asked by both students and educational institutions is exactly what students are getting for their money. This is applying a certain pressure on physical academic institutions to improve and enhance the in-person educational experience of their