The 21st century brought two great innovations for education. In the higher education sector, we were able to see a massive increase in the number of open online courses from higher education institutions. For K-12 schools, the innovation of the year was the flipped classroom.

The latter was widely discussed in society, particularly in renowned newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Still, there is no convincing evidence on how many educators use the flipped classroom in their teaching practice and, more importantly, what effect the flipped classroom has on student learning.

In case you didn’t know, the flipped classroom is a form of blended teaching method when students attend school while actively using the advantages of online learning. At home, they watch lectures or online lessons while they do their homework in the classroom. The question is how this new approach influences student outcomes. With the classroom flipped, they do the same thing, just in a different order. They still learn by listening to their teachers, and most online lectures are very simple, even primitive, videos.

This question makes sense although it loses the main advantage of the flipped classroom approach. In real-time classroom lesson, if a student does not understand something, it is their problem and nothing can be done. Teachers cannot repeat material for one or two people. When learning online, a student can pause a video and rewatch the part they did not understand. Also, they don’t have to go through the material they already know (they just skip it). The flipped classroom gives students more independence and flexibility in their learning process

Watching lectures online at home is not much different from doing traditional homework. Meanwhile, there is still an important difference: in traditional education, time spent in a classroom is primarily a passive process, when students simply take in raw content. With the inverted learning approach, in the classroom, they discuss problems, do practical work, etc. In this environment, the teacher is always available to ask questions and provide feedback on the work done. In this sense, flipped learning solves one of the main drawbacks of traditional education, which is that students do not receive feedback from their teachers.

Although it is very beneficial in many ways, the flipped classroom approach still does not solve many traditional learning problems, such as lack of motivation among students, which can be called underperforming. Some experts even suggested that this approach can only work in suburban schools, with high-income students. Low-income students may lack access to the Internet and computers, so the new approach may have little chance of success among them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/us/25iht-educside25.html