Ready for the Flipped Classroom? Preliminary Experiences of The New Approach In Teaching Economics to Non-Major Students

Abstract

The flipped classroom is an innovative educational model that has attracted more attention recently. In the flipped classroom, course content is delivered via online videos and/or pre-recorded lectures that can be watched by students at home. It can free up the class time that lecturers are able to devote for learner-centered activities such as problem solving and active learning. This research is motivated by the flipping model with an aim to engage students’ learning outside of the classroom as well as respond to the challenges of teaching economics to non-economics majors, which reflect difficulties in delivering all the materials given the limited time period of a class. An online tool called “EDpuzzle” is introduced to facilitate flipping the class. After four-week trial of partially flipping the classroom, we surveyed 170 students from three economics modules to gather their feedback in order to explore the possibility and potential to adopt the flipped classroom strategy at a wider scale. Our pilot analysis indicates that technologies, like EDpuzzle, can help lecturers to deliver the course content through videos and monitor the class, but more effort is needed to motivate and encourage students to participate and prepare. In addition, flipping a class also involves design of various types of activities, including in-class and out-of-class, which are all vital for an effective flipped classroom. Therefore, our study calls for further research on how to design, implement and evaluate the flipped classroom in economics teaching.