Flipped Classroom Teaching Intervention Proposal:

My Actual Proposal.
I am writing about an intervention proposal based on what actually happened for a small-scale class that I have for one of my Digital Marketing modules. The class is small 8 to 12 students in total and the module is 13 weeks long. The subject is Digital Marketing, level 8 and the class takes place in the evening between 7-10pm on a Monday night.

The class was flipped and turned into an active learning class following reading an article published by Plymouth University 7 Steps to: a Flipped Classroom with several discussions,
(7 Steps to a Flipped Classroom, 2014). I also had a number of discussions with a few other lecturers as I became aware of the possibility that the learners in my class may not be self-regulated learners or be confident in learning by themselves, (Teaching In Highered, 2016).

Current Practice and the Students – The Scene.
My students are mixed, aged 25 – mid 50’s; generally they arrive in the Wicklow Campus at around 7pm or just before class begins. The class is a Lab based class with computers (Lab 1) laid out in a lecture theatre style where all of the machines are facing away from the lecturer. All of the computers and students are all boxed in rows going back to the rear of the classroom just like you’d see in a movie theatre. Students generally have to push by one another to get out and it makes for a lot of effort to get up and leave or go elsewhere within the room.

Rationale.
The start of each class was simply a process of going through the Agenda of the session and to inform the students what the lesson entailed and what activities were going to take place. The slides were designed to inform, impart knowledge and then the activities were designed to promote group work and engagement. Engagement was the whole point here with predicting learning gains with feedback and collaborative learning based on tasks given, (Gibbs, 2014).

Unfortunately collaborative learning just didn’t happen as I was trying to engage with the students and get them to at least engage with each other. Engaging with the students is fundamental to this module, the topic requires a lot of interaction, group/team work as well as discussions of the latest trends and developments in Digital Marketing and Social Media, (Chaffey, 2016).

On delivering the content through PowerPoint slides together with paper handouts I found that the students weren’t engaging with themselves or participating within any group activities designed or arranged for the class. Most of them were gazing at the slides or the computer screens in-front of them or falling asleep while doing so. One or two of the students actually refused to do any of the tasks, (Trends-in-Higher-Education-Marketing-Recruitment-and-Technology-2, 2014).

This continued and the situation became very difficult, as delivering the class was torturous and to get group/team work or engagement was almost impossible. According to (Masika and Jones, 2015) student engagement and social participation is the core of learning and that individual learning is not how people learn. They go on to indicate that lived experience and learning by doing is how we learn in the social world. Social participation as (Wenger, 2009) states means that people must be socially active with a given activity or task. I tried to get my leaners to socially participate to create meaning in why the tasks were necessary. Students learn more by working in groups/teams and so I decided to flip my classroom by asking students to undertake tasks and activities prior to class both online and offline these included lecture videos, other videos, quizzes and website work, (Brame, 2016).

Intervention and Activities.
To do this I requested that students move to a different classroom (Lab 2). This was a computer lab arranged in a horseshoe shape where all the computers faced the lecturer and there was space around to allow for interaction, free movement and group/team work. I indicated to the students why I was doing this and why this change was necessary, (Schell, 2012).

The lab and computer room allowed for much more social interaction and development. This was my whole strategy to make the students think and challenge them to learn in different ways by making it really interesting to get them to apply their learning and ask questions, (Zepke, Leach and Butler, 2013).

As part of this intervention, I asked students to undertake a number of tasks before the next session. These tasks were simple in nature and included requesting that they watch a video prior to the next session. Then they were asked to write out how they would apply the SEO principles to their websites. They were instructed that they would be applying these principles to their websites in their groups within the next session. Various quizzes were set on Blackboard about SEO and they were informed about this with handouts as instructions and referred to Blackboard to undertake the tasks. These tasks only reaffirmed the learning by giving students exposure to the content before the class and it gave them an incentive to prepare as they were going to be undertaking the tasks in class, (Brame, 2016).

Results and Reflection from the Intervention.
As each class progressed the atmosphere got better within the room and students were more mobile in the room moving about from computer to computer helping each other out. Students even came in earlier to work in their groups/teams on their project.

More activities were issued within the class and prior to each session with the majority of students completing the work on arrival to each class, (Gibbs, 1994).

The intervention in my opinion had to happen, I have two other classes of the same module running in the evening at the same time in different locations and they were running perfectly. I had no issues with group work or setting tasks to be completed prior to class in these locations. I knew that I had to do something with this poorly performing class to improve the environment and instill some responsibility in them for their own learning, (Gibbs and Habeshaw, 1989). I was doing all the work in the class even though I had done some serious prep work before hand.

As each of the sessions progressed the students seemed to embrace the group/team work activities and they gradually started to talk with each other and engage with the class and the material. The room seemed to make the difference but the process of changing the room also made them think about what was happening within the classes, (Masika and Jones, 2015).

I think there may have been a difference in learning styles amongst the learners, (Lowy and Hood, 2013) and perhaps the learning curve was too steep for them, I changed my expectations once the room change was implemented, (Kolb, 1984).

I felt that before I implemented this intervention that the students didn’t seem to belong to this course or the room, as if somehow it was the wrong course as there wasn’t any cohesive link to the course or to myself. A sense of belonging to the course just didn’t seem to be evident even though I tried to get them to create a Facebook page for the course, seeing that they are studying Digital Marketing and Social Media. Initially this didn’t happen, however once the class was flipped this completely changed and there seemed to be better group/team focus on activities given and prepared before the start of each session, (Masika and Jones, 2015).

Conclusion:
In summary I feel that following on from the intervention students seemed to become more receptive and engaged more when asked to do tasks in this way. In general they became more focused on their group work within the class and even outside the class they began to meet up over coffee and engage with each other. I was seriously worried about this class before the intervention and after implementing a number of flipped classroom techniques I saw a transformation of the students behaviour. I believe that this class turned from a behavioural perspective which indicates the importance of student behaviour and satisfaction with achievement and the need to consider the students’ motivations and expectations when undertaking flipping a class and trying to frame student engagement within an intervention, (Kahu, 2013).

References

7 Steps to a Flipped Classroom. (2014). 1st ed. [pdf] Plymouth, England: Plymouth University:, pp.1-2. Available at: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/uploads/production/document/path/2/2399/7_Steps_to_a_Flipped_Classroom.pdf [Accessed 7 Dec. 2016].

Brame, C. (2013). Flipping the Classroom | Center for Teaching | Vanderbilt University. [online] Cft.vanderbilt.edu. Available at: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/flipping-the-classroom [Accessed 8 Dec. 2016].

Chaffey, D. (2016). Digital Marketing Trends 2016 – 2017 – Smart Insights Digital Marketing Advice. [online] Smart Insights. Available at: http://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/marketing-innovation/digital-marketing-trends-2016-2017 [Accessed 7 Dec. 2016].

Kahu, E. (2013). Framing student engagement in higher education. Studies in Higher Education, [online] 38(5), pp.758-773. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233479969_Framing_Student_Engagement_in_Higher_Education [Accessed 9 Dec. 2016].

Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential learning. 1st ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Gibbs, G. (1994). Developing students’ transferable skills. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff Development.

Gibbs, G. (1994). Learning in teams. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff Development.

Gibbs, G. (2014). Student engagement, the latest buzzword. [online] Times Higher Education (THE). Available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/student-engagement-the-latest-buzzword/2012947.article [Accessed 8 Dec. 2016].

Gibbs, G. and Habeshaw, T. (1989). Preparing to teach: an introduction to effective teaching in higher education. 1st ed. Bristol: Technical and Educational Servicers Ltd., p.p.37.

Lowy, A. and Hood, P. (2013). The power of the 2 x 2 matrix. 1st ed. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, pp.267-270.

Masika, R. and Jones, J. (2015). Building student belonging and engagement: insights into higher education students’ experiences of participating and learning together. Teaching in Higher Education, [online] 21(2), pp.138-150. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/journal/0729-4360_Higher_Education_Research_and_Development [Accessed 9 Dec. 2016].

Schell, J. (2012). Student Resistance to Flipped Classrooms. [Blog] Turn to Your Neighbour: The Official Peer Instruction Blog. Available at: http://blog. peerinstruction.net/2012/03/02/peer-instruction- and-student-resistance-to-interactive-pedagogy [Accessed 10 Dec. 2016].

Teaching In Highered, (2016). EP. 110. [podcast] Self-regulated Learning and the Flipped Classroom with Robert Talbert. Available at: http://teachinginhighered.com/podcast/self-regulated-learning-flipped-classroom [Accessed 9 Dec. 2016].

Trends-in-Higher-Education-Marketing-Recruitment-and-Technology-2. (2014). 1st ed. [ebook] Washington, DC: Hanover Research, pp.5-9 & 23. Available at: http://www.hanoverresearch.com/media/Trends-in-Higher-Education-Marketing-Recruitment-and-Technology-2.pdf [Accessed 9 Dec. 2016].

Wenger, E. (2009). A Social Theory of Learning, In Contemporary Theories of Learning: Learning Theorists.. in their own words. 1st ed. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, pp.Edited by K. Illeris, 209 – 218.

Zepke, N., Leach, L. and Butler, P. (2013). Student engagement: students’ and teachers’ perceptions. Higher Education Research & Development, [online] 33(2), pp.386-398. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/journal/0729-4360_Higher_Education_Research_and_Development [Accessed 9 Dec. 2016].