Challenges in Implementing the Flipped Classroom Model in Higher Education

Introduction

The flipped classroom model has increased in popularity over the last decade (Bergmann & Sams, 2012, Davis, Dean, & Ball, 2013; Enfield, 2013). This model differs from a traditional classroom in that course content is introduced to students not through lectures but through other ways outside of the classroom. As a consequence of the technological affordances in recent years, in many flipped classroom models this is typically done through recorded lectures or shorter video-clips which the students are required to watch in their own time. Subsequently, in the classroom, the students engage with the lecture content through more active approaches. By ‘active’ is meant that students do not just ‘consume’ what is delivered from the front of the class in a didactic way, but that they are actively engaged in making sense of the material. For example, through problem-based activities, brainstorming, group/pair work. There is much diversity and many emerging understandings of what the model entails, and it is likely that this is to continue for some time to come.

It is important to emphasise that although in many flipped classroom models, recorded video lectures, or short video clips are used, the defining characteristic of the flipped model is not the use of video, but moving the typically transmission-mode or didactic delivery of course content out of the classroom and to the students’ out-of-class study time. The “Flip Classroom Network” provides the following definition that captures this defining characteristic:

Abeysekera and Dawson (2015, p.1) provide a more succinct definition, also foregrounding the active nature of what happens in class instead of merely focusing on the use of videos: “Flipped classroom approaches remove the traditional transmissive lecture and replace it with active in-class tasks and pre/post-class work”

One criticism that could be aimed at the current popularity of this model is that this approach is not new at all and that many teachers have been actively engaging their students for quite some time, whether in lecture settings or other delivery models, such as seminars, or workshops. Furthermore, there is an increasing interest in making lectures more interactive. For teachers who would typically engage their students already through active learning approaches in lecture based sessions, this model nonetheless could enhance what they are doing by freeing up more time, and adding technologies that may appeal to the current generation of learners. Time could be freed up by, for example, reducing the number or length of lectures. This switch would allow them to spend even more time discussing and solving problems (Becker, 2013). Although the literature suggest that the Flipped Classroom Model has been a particular issue of interest in United States education for some years now, but it has also started to attract attention elsewhere in the world (see for example Abeysekera & Dawson, 2015; van der Meer et al, 2015).